A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “What are you doing? You promised me you’d quit.”

  A declaration of intent, a childish act of rebellion that meant no turning back. That was what his first puff of smoke equated to. And then he told her. Described in excruciating detail what he’d seen that day eighteen years ago, recounted one by one each of the particulars that he’d replayed endlessly in his mind since that time.

  “I know I’m not Javier’s father. That it was that guy who got you pregnant. I don’t know how long it went on, or if it was just that one time, but it doesn’t really matter. I waited for ages for you to tell me about it, just as I waited to gather the courage to tell you that I knew. I saw it all, Lola. And I realized the moment I laid eyes on Javier in the incubator.”

  Lola sat perfectly still, as if she was dead, observing the cigarette smoke waft up. And then she did something surprising: She plucked the cigarette from Gonzalo’s fingers and took a long, deep, expert drag, closing her eyes.

  “So, what are we going to do with what we know?” she asked.

  He was hurt by her directness. Stripped for the first time of all masks, her open expression was bare and merciless. No secrets. She didn’t ask forgiveness or offer excuses. She simply took the cigarette and accepted that the time for lying was now past. All right, then, her expression and wave of the hand seemed to say, you cut the deck, not me. What now?

  Gonzalo had gotten up from the table as if the person staring at him were an impostor.

  “I don’t know, Lola.”

  The evidence of their words was there, but it felt like none of it was really happening. Now, in his little half-furnished living room, listening to Charlie Parker’s sax on “Perdido,” freed of his obligation, he’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes. In the shop downstairs he’d bought a bottle of gin and several miniature bottles of tonic. The Chinese man who ran the place thought he’d misunderstood at first. This was attorney Gonzalo Gil. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. This was a man who always behaved as was expected of him, who acted surprised every year at his surprise party. The shopkeeper handed him the bottle with the gloom of a man who had a front-row seat for the collapse of civilization.

  “You look like hell and smell like cheap liquor.”

  Gonzalo was driving slowly and hiding behind his dark glasses. He hadn’t shaved and for the first time in years had shown up at his mother’s residence without a tie.

  “You, on the other hand, look wonderful, Mamá.”

  As he did each Sunday, Gonzalo parked in front of the flower shop and let his mother go in to do battle with the florist over which flowers to take to the grave by the lake. He had an unbelievable hangover; the last thing he remembered from the previous night was vomiting everywhere on his way to the bathroom. He had the hazy impression that he’d spent a long time on the floor, crying and holding the locket with the photo of Irina as Parker’s sax urged him to feel like shit. When the alarm clock went off at dawn, he was lying on the floor, his neck was killing him, and the stench coming from his clothes was horrific. Pathetic.

  “Do you mind telling me what’s the matter with you?”

  His mother had chosen different flowers this time: African impatiens with bright leaves, vivid colors, and a sweet scent. The name made him think of Siaka. Gonzalo had gone to visit him at the hotel where he was hiding out, and Siaka had told him stories about where he was from. Against all odds, he hadn’t run off after the laptop disappeared, and despite rarely venturing outside of the hotel, he seemed bizarrely optimistic. Gonzalo had told him about his meeting with the prosecutor, how the man had warned him that without evidence there was no case. And the evidence was on the laptop.

  “You’ll find it, I know you will,” he’d said.

  Gonzalo himself was less optimistic.

  “Gonzalo…?”

  He glanced over at his mother. She’d worn her black dress and pulled her hair back with bobby pins. She smelled of hand soap and light cologne. The only irrefutable sign Gonzalo saw of her age were the wrinkles behind her earlobes, onto which she’d clasped a pair of fake pearls.

  “I met a girl named Tania. She’s Russian. When I saw her mother, for a second I got the feeling I knew her. Something about you just now reminded me of her.”

  “Old people all blur together, lose their contours. We all end up looking alike, acting alike. You should see the people at the residence. Same ailments, same expressions, same conversations. We show each other our pills and prescriptions like they were trading cards.”

  Esperanza was in a good mood. The presence of death earlier that morning had made her feel sprightly; it was a reminder that she too was on the waiting list. While others found this idea terrifying, to Esperanza it was simply evidence of what was clearly logical. A rest. Early that morning, the attendants had gone into the room next door. Esperanza had been writing when she first heard the wailing on the other side of the wall. She recognized the specific type of moan, yet still went out into the hall to corroborate. The doctor on call stood consoling a man, patting his shoulder. Seconds later the attendants emerged with a stretcher, her neighbor’s silhouette visible beneath the sheet.

  She hadn’t spoken to the woman much; Esperanza preferred not to strike up friendships that might not last. Everyone there was going the same place, and they knew and accepted it. This was their last stop. They told each other their names, spoke of their kids and the past, and no one worried too much about whether what they said was true or not. It was like an open bar, and no one was going to demand a certificate of authenticity to validate the version of events anyone else presented. They read their last books, listened to their last songs, took their last walks, and played their last games. The common denominator in relationships between the residents was a sense of impermanence. That was why, after a time, family visits started to be upsetting. They brought false hope, evidence of the fact that outside those walls and grounds, life carried on.

  Esperanza hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to enter her neighbor’s newly unoccupied room a few hours later. She’d sat down in a chair facing the bedframe, which now had no mattress. Every time someone died, they changed it. As if death were somehow contagious. Then she’d gone back to her room and the letters she’d written Elías. Esperanza spent a long time rereading them and was surprised to see that the last one was dated 1938. Too many years of silence. Without thinking about it, she began writing to him again, not with the passion of her youth but in the calm knowledge that there was only one thing left to say.

  Dearest, we both know that this is my last letter…

  Mother and son repeated the ritual every Sunday. The family house and property were slowly being engulfed by a sort of no-man’s-land, surrounded by pylons, bollards, spotlights, and heavy machinery. Fascinated by the absurdity of destroying natural beauty in order to replace it with a simulacrum of itself, Esperanza watched the trucks coming and going on the roads around the lake, following the trails of dust they raised. Her little corner was still holding out, but it would end up being claimed by that pastiche of golf courses, townhomes with private yards, and luxurious facilities.

  “When we moved here in the fifties there wasn’t even a highway yet. Your father had to go down the mountain to get to the valley mill and then come back up the path after dark.”

  Gonzalo had heard these stories before, but this time he got the feeling that his mother wasn’t speaking with nostalgia but simple acknowledgment. She was glad to have lived through those times but accepted that they were all in the past. And this seemed to free her.

  Esperanza had slowly approached the mound beneath the fig tree, and Gonzalo was helping her pull out the weeds that had grown and to replace the old flowers on the grave with the fresh ones. He thought this was the right moment to tell her that he wasn’t going to sell his part of the property and that she should refuse to sell, too. He’d been hoping she would be pleased at the news, but Esperan
za only shook her head slowly, fingers stroking the burial mound’s dried earth.

  “He’s not here. He never was, and he’s certainly not coming back now. All this,” she said, her eyes taking in the house, the valley, the lake, “is just a dream, something to cling to. I won’t be coming back. I’m done waiting. I’m tired.”

  That was what she’d told Elías in her last letter. She was simply saying goodbye, with no bitterness and no tenderness.

  Esperanza looked at her son and thought of all the things that could have gone differently but actually seemed fitting, all things considered. She was proud of him, despite knowing that his life had been built on false ideas. She understood what he was trying to do with this foolish act of rebellion, taking on the world over a piece of worthless land. After all, he was like Laura. And they had both inherited their father’s combative character. She wasn’t going to stop him. If he needed to stand up for himself against his despicable father-in-law, she would certainly applaud. But that was his fight, not hers.

  “If you don’t really love your wife, leave her now. It’s not too late. It’s not worth giving up your life for someone who will never be right for you.”

  Esperanza’s skin was like fiberglass when he stroked her cheek. And underneath, her words were open and frank, the wisdom of a mother who has seen and heard too much. For years she’d watched her son sink into unhappiness as he contorted this way and that in order to be accepted by people who would always see him as an outsider, no matter what. He’d paid too high a price, gone against his very nature, hidden his true self so well that it seemed actually to have disappeared and left behind some inoffensive, characterless soul. And yet he’d still never been given a place at their table. Esperanza had been hurt beyond belief by Laura’s betrayal. First the article she wrote, destroying her father’s name, and then going to work for Alcázar, the man Esperanza hated most in the world. Those actions had irrevocably alienated her from her daughter, but she admitted that behind the cruel actions lay Laura’s determination to be her own woman, not to be swept along by the myths or buckle under the weight of Elías’s reputation.

  Fearless, determined, and irresponsible, Laura hadn’t hesitated to break all ties with the past. She’d lived her life the way she wanted, even though she occasionally got lost because her direction was as changeable as her character. And she’d paid the price. But Gonzalo? No. Her son, the boy who had been packed off to Catholic boarding school because at the time it was the only way to get him a decent education and three hot meals a day, had given up all forms of rebellion the day he met his wife. And the only refuge he’d had since that time came in the form of believing his father was a god, a deity to pray to at night and to venerate as he sank into mediocrity.

  Now he wanted to live his father’s life as a means of reclaiming his own. Esperanza knew he was making a mistake but didn’t have the strength or the willpower to tell him the whole truth. And what was truth, anyway? Facts? Events, exactly as they occurred? Or the reasons behind them? Which part of that hypothetical truth—the one that Alcázar had threatened her with so she’d sell her property—could she possibly tell him without destroying the shaky foundations on which his determination lay? Was that fair to do now, just when her son had finally decided to take a decisive step?

  No, it wasn’t. And besides, she told herself, truth was nothing but the other side of the lie, just as harmful and unreal. No more flowers, no more graves, no more yellow letters. If time was marching on, devouring everything in its path like those excavators down at the lake, so be it.

  “I know what it’s like to live with someone who never truly loved you. And if I could turn the clock back, I don’t think I’d follow your father’s footsteps again.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. Your father was fond of me, I don’t doubt that. And in the end I think he was genuine. But love and affection are not the same. It’s easy to confuse tenderness with empathy, passion with solace, need with habit…I was never the woman of your father’s dreams. That private world of his—locked inside the shed, banging away on the old typewriter—belonged to Irina. The locket you found in my jacket…I’d forgotten about it. It was hers. She was the woman your father fell in love with before he met me. They were together for a very short time and she died in circumstances I’d rather not have to tell you about, but their time together marked him forever and filled him with remorse and guilt and sadness that affected all of our lives. She was a presence that never left him, and I spent all those years fighting her tooth and nail, fighting a ghost that would reappear out of the blue and steal my husband, take him from my bed, snatch him from my hands, and there was nothing I could do but wait quietly for him to return.”

  Esperanza spread the African impatiens on the empty grave like a fan, placing stones on the stems to keep the wind from carrying them off. She grabbed her son’s hand for support to stand up and then looked out at the shimmering lake in the distance, just a stain between the mountains.

  “I don’t want you to make the sacrifices I made for something that isn’t worth it. Blind love is not true love, it’s just one more lie.”

  Was Elías really down there, as she’d always suspected? When the lake was drained, she would finally find out. But perhaps that hateful inspector was right and she was wrong. Perhaps Elías did run off after all, abandoning her because he simply couldn’t carry on with the charade. Maybe that was why she didn’t want them to drain the lake. And maybe that was also why her son shouldn’t let them. It was up to him. All she wanted to do was go back to the residence to sit and wait for it to be her turn for the attendants to take the mattress from her room.

  The doorman was waiting for Gonzalo. Someone had left another delivery for him at the porter’s lodge downstairs. This time it had come certified mail, but there was no return address. Gonzalo opened the large envelope, enduring the eager curiosity of the doorman, who peeked over his shoulder as though he too were involved in the mystery.

  “Certified mail is always bad news,” he said ominously, as though this absurd proclamation were borne out by experience. “Traffic tickets, repossessions, court summonses.”

  It was none of those things. Instead the envelope contained a long list of VAT numbers and private limited companies, with a handwritten note at the bottom of the page: “Money laundering.” Two of the companies were highlighted in fluorescent marker. Their names sounded familiar. Gonzalo went up to the apartment and phoned Luisa.

  “Do you have access to the company database?”

  She did. He was referring to a tax database used in the legal industry that gave attorneys access to data on hundreds of companies with operations in Spain: their finance capital, known activity, tax address, board of directors, workforce, etc.

  “Look up these two: Alfadac and Enpistrenm.”

  “Right now? It could take a little time.”

  Gonzalo was holding the paper in his hand, racking his brains trying to remember where he’d seen those names.

  “I’ll be here.”

  Five minutes later, Luisa called back.

  “Alfadac and Enpistrenm are holding and investment firms. They’re both headquartered in London but have offices all over the world. Their backing is Russian, and the boards and shareholders are, too. I’d say they have the same parent company. I can fax you the names if you want; they’re unpronounceable.”

  “Send them over.”

  “Will do. One more thing: In the last three years, both companies have shown special interest in property development here in Spain. Together they add up to forty percent of the backing behind the ACASA consortium.”

  Gonzalo froze.

  “You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Isn’t your father-in-law the one representing them as consultant for the lake development?”

  Indeed he was. And Gonzalo’s refus
al to sell had put the brakes on the project. Acted as a “pebble in his shoe,” as Agustín had said. He gazed at the note at the bottom of the page: “Money laundering.” The envelope contained a dozen or so documents detailing all sorts of operations—diversion of funds and other forms of whitewashing. What Gonzalo had before him was the Matryoshka’s legal structure, their Achilles’ heel. And at least two of their companies had ties to his father-in-law.

  It wasn’t the old man Gonzalo was holding up, he realized. It was the Matryoshka’s shoe he’d slipped into.

  He called Siaka. “How did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Open the confidential folder and send me the list of Matryoshka companies.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t send you anything.”

  Then who had? Gonzalo went back to the envelope and emptied it onto the table, searched through the papers until he found a photograph. It was an old picture of Laura, with her son Roberto. They were at what looked like a water park, waving at the camera and smiling identical smiles. Gonzalo turned it over and read what was written on the back: “Now you can convince that prosecutor to finish your sister’s job.”

  15

  MOSCOW, LATE MARCH 1934

  You couldn’t exactly call the yellow sheets of paper she wrote on a diary. Esperanza had started writing them more like letters to some vague, hypothetical person she hadn’t quite identified. Sometimes she thought she was writing to herself, to that other girl she felt beneath her skin, like a twin sister who was very different from her, someone reserved whom she could communicate with only by letter. Occasionally, they were simple observations on everyday things, other times they were reflections that seemed almost to be dictated to her by that other Esperanza, and often they were full of doubts and unanswered questions.