A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  Alcázar felt a wave of nausea on hearing Laura’s memory trampled that way. And he himself had helped discredit her, so thoroughly that she’d turned into a different person.

  “They have a lot of particulars, though, including lists of payments—and you and I are both on them. Whoever has that laptop is clearly coming after us.”

  Agustín hunched his head into the turned-up collar of his coat, gazing scornfully at what was taking place just a few yards away. Police had cleared a path, and the diggers advanced relentlessly.

  “Don’t let that worry you; they’re firing blanks. I’ll navigate these waters. You just worry about the witness. Find him and make sure he doesn’t show up to testify.”

  “What’s going to happen with Gonzalo?”

  Agustín’s expression shifted slightly. The whole Javier business had been unfortunate, something that required all of his skills and the cashing in of a considerable part of the favors owed him. But in the end, with Alcázar’s help, things could be fixed. Carlos had turned out to be a professional blackmailer with more than twenty priors—all kinds of bribery and other misdemeanors. He was well known to both police and judges, who had no sympathy for leeches like him. It wasn’t hard to find an empathetic judge who, aided by the evidence supplied by Alcázar’s cronies, accepted the theory of legitimate defense: Carlos had been blackmailing Javier, as the photos proved (the few in which Javier wasn’t openly obliging); Javier refused to keep paying and threatened to go to the police; Carlos tried to scare him by pulling a gun and there was a struggle; Carlos ended up dead and Javier gravely injured.

  This was the line of defense they would have to present, although it still needed some finessing; there were loose ends to tie up. As soon as Javier was in a position to testify, Agustín would bring him up to speed and make sure he stuck to this version of events. He would have to deal with ridicule after coming out publicly as a homosexual, but that was no crime—although Agustín found it quite distasteful. Nothing at all would be said about Lola. Regardless of what Agustín thought about that side of things, the sense that he’d failed as a father didn’t matter right now. She was his daughter and he’d do whatever was necessary to protect her.

  And the truth was, the whole business, no matter how dramatic, had ended up benefiting him in a sense. Gonzalo turned out not to be as much of a milquetoast as he’d thought. All of his do-gooder lawyer scruples had gone right out the window the moment he realized that his son could go to jail, that his family could be torn apart. Agustín’s son-in-law hadn’t thought twice about lying, swearing that he had a feeling that someone was extorting his son, and that Carlos had even asked Gonzalo himself for money, thereby proving his suspicions. He also hid Lola’s role in the whole thing from the police. The man bent to Agustín’s will without a word, like an obedient little lamb, and had proved he was up to the task. Gonzalo had nerves of steel. If he divorced Lola in the end, under the circumstances, it would be a bittersweet victory. After all, his son-in-law had proved far more dignified than his daughter.

  Agustín and Gonzalo had avoided each other while Javier was in the hospital, but they did so courteously, each giving the other space, putting their personal issues on the back burner for weeks while the boy recovered. And then one day, Gonzalo showed up at his office.

  “How soon do you think we can go through with the merger?” he asked, as though picking up the thread of a conversation they’d left off the day before. In his hand was the bill of sale for the lake house, already signed.

  Agustín would have preferred to win another way, this was what he thought as he drove off, with the demolition crew getting to work despite the protesters’ opposition. But a victory was a victory, that was what counted.

  Alcázar had parked beside Agustín’s car. They shook hands and said goodbye. The ex-inspector had something he wanted to check.

  He hardly remembered the house at all, having been there on only two occasions before the night at the lake. Both times, Elías had refused to let him through the front gate. It looked more or less the same as he remembered it. Maybe a little more welcoming. Laura, he recalled, had been at the far end of the yard, by the well. She was thirteen or fourteen years old, and at the time Alcázar hardly paid any attention to her. He remembered Gonzalo running around, too, barefoot and shirtless, a bag of bones with protruding ears and a crew cut—which kids wore back then to avoid lice.

  “It must have been right here. This is where it happened.”

  The well was dry, covered with a large stone he could barely move. The bottom had grown over with whitish weeds that were tangled up with roots sticking out from between the mossy bricks. Alcázar tossed in a small stone and watched it bounce off the walls. Gonzalo’s little body must have felt that fragile when his sister hid him in there, sliding him down on the pulley. How many hours did he spend down there, scared to death, water up to his waist? The night of San Juan in 1967, when he finally got Laura to tell him the truth, she’d said she didn’t know. She was terrified.

  The day had started like any other day. Laura had slept in her narrow room, holding Gonzalo, who’d had one of his nightmares and come running to the safety of her arms. On the other side of the wall she could hear her father’s rasping breath. She couldn’t hear her mother but knew that her eyes were open before the first light of dawn came in through the window. From her room, Laura must have seen her mother float past like a breeze, making no useless gestures, not opening her mouth, going downstairs to the fireplace to fan the embers. Laura dressed silently so as not to wake Gonzalo. Esperanza cocked her head on seeing her daughter, giving her the sad complicit smile of their shared fate. As if she didn’t know what was going on. Her mother pretended not to see that Laura’s eyes were swollen, after having cried all night. She hardly ever sang songs in Russian anymore, was no longer quick to laugh.

  Esperanza pulled Laura to her, sat the girl on her lap and, as she fixed her hair with bobby pins, told her daughter about how she first met Elías and the things they’d had to go through before she was born. It was an attempt to convince her that her father was, despite it all, a good man. She told Laura about the years they’d had to spend apart because of the war in Europe, where her father had fought the Fascists in the Battle of Leningrad, first to defend the city and then to retake it. She proudly showed her the box of medals and awards he’d earned in that brutal war, the photos taken in Leningrad, and then Stalingrad, and in Berlin on Victory Day when Hitler was defeated. And she told Laura how, finally, after five long years, Elías had come and found her, simply turned up at the door of the Toulouse workshop where she worked.

  “And what did you do all those years?”

  Esperanza smiled wistfully. “I waited. I could have had a different life. One day a famous agent for performing artists saw me and said he wanted to take me to Paris and make me a star.” Esperanza vividly evoked the enormous buildings and convertibles, recounted the hustle and bustle of the trams, the actresses’ dresses and hairstyles and makeup, their long legs and narrow waists, the elegant way they moved and smoked. Talking about it, she was momentarily transformed; it was as if she was another person, the woman she could have been. But then suddenly Esperanza fell silent and looked around, eyes full of reproach. It smelled of manure, of damp straw. It smelled of everything she hated—the dry leather of harnesses, the sweat of animals, her own sweat.

  “You mustn’t hold on to anything that makes you sad, like memories. I chose my own destiny, and that’s more than a lot of people can say. And my destiny was always your father.”

  “And why do you let this happen?”

  Esperanza had half closed the door so that no one could hear them. She took a deep breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Her mother’s eyes grew distant, faraway, darkening as though a storm cloud had crossed through them. She had never hit either of her children.
But her hand lashed out in fury at the truth her daughter spat at her, and she slapped Laura’s mouth as though to seal it, so she wouldn’t have to hear.

  “Go fetch the water from the well,” she said very quietly, gazing down at her fingers, wondering what she’d just done. She stepped back into the doorway and hugged herself with her arms, an icy chill running through her body, a pained and exhausted expression on her face.

  That morning, the morning of the night of San Juan, Laura probably picked her way quickly along the low stone wall covered in dry vines and damp moss, made it to the well, and filled the pails with water. And when she returned, Elías was there, staring at her with his one eye. And what she saw in his face terrified her.

  Alcázar gazed down into the bottom of the well. It was impossible for anything good to come from under the peat moss, where the clay was packed so tight not even water or air could penetrate it. He looked up at the house, decaying more each day, surrounded by barren fields, as though having given up. The only mercy it could hope for was that the weeds would hide its ruins, erasing it from the earth. That was the future awaiting the past. That and silence.

  At eleven o’clock at night there were very few people out on the street. On the ground floor of his building was a trattoria that stayed open late, and customers’ voices filtered up through the windows. When he got back from the hospital, Gonzalo took off his shoes and fell into bed, still fully clothed. He listened to conversations slowly dying down. A drunk with a beautiful voice was singing a Portuguese fado by Dulce Pontes that Gonzalo knew. He joined in as the drunk’s voice trailed off in the distance.

  Mâe adeus. Adeus, Maria

  Guarda bem no teu sentido

  Que aqui te faço uma jura:

  Que ou te levo à sacristia

  Ou foi Deus que foi servido

  Dar-me no mar sepultura

  The room was dark, but light came in from the streetlamps in the plaza below. It was raining and the raindrops shone in the yellow haze of the streetlamps. His balcony doors were wide open, and water ricocheted off the chipped railing. Thousands of tiny, fragmented drops bounced into the bedroom, wetting the back of an armchair and the floor tiles. It was lovely when it rained like that—musical. Rather than hide, it made you want to walk out in the downpour without an umbrella, to dissolve right along with those drops and become just one more of them.

  Gonzalo’s answering machine was flashing beside the phone. Since selling the lake house, he had received endless insulting messages calling him a traitor, a sell-out, a money-grabber, a scumbag. Not one of the people calling him those names had a kid in the hospital with his chest blown open, not one of them worried day and night about having their ten-year-old daughter kidnapped by murderers.

  “You did what you had to do.” Tania had been trying to comfort him. “No one can judge you for that.”

  And yet she had, that very afternoon when the two of them were sitting at a table at Flight and he told her that he needed some time to be alone and decide what to do. She’d given him a look, her eyes like two gray stones pushing him under.

  “Wiping the slate clean, is that it?”

  Gonzalo had nodded vaguely, as though somehow expecting this reaction. And although he had the urge to move closer to her, he didn’t do it. Gonzalo didn’t know what he expected of Tania; he hardly knew her, and from what he’d found out, she had lied to him from the start.

  “The whole business with my father and your mother…I feel trapped by so many lies, Tania. I’m shaken up, I don’t know what to do, what to believe,” he explained, his face that of a man who has decided to stop fighting—even though whatever he’s fighting will never go away, even though he’ll never beat it.

  Tania’s jaw had clenched, and her pursed lips formed a thin line. But she’d been the one to take the first step. She did it slowly, giving him the chance to reject her, to listen to the skittish voice in his head screaming that this was not right. But the voice petered out like a death rattle when he felt the touch of her cracked lips, inhaled her faint smell of lipstick and cigarettes.

  “You can believe in this. Because this is true.”

  Was it? He wasn’t certain. But Tania made him feel good, didn’t ask him to be someone he wasn’t or push him in any one direction, Gonzalo thought as he erased the messages on his machine one by one after listening to them. A series of insults that he hardly even registered. The last one, though, was different.

  So you threw in the towel, bent over for your father-in-law and the police. And you think that’s the end of it? You think Laura would forgive you? You’re not out of the game until the last round, Gonzalo. Not as long as Aldo Rossi has your sister’s computer.

  It was Siaka’s voice. But he was parroting someone else’s words. Gonzalo knew the kid enough to be able to tell that beneath his defiant tone lay a tinge of fear.

  Hearing some sort of disturbance down on the street, voices shouting, Gonzalo poked his head out to see three shapes in the dumpsters on the corner—beggars fighting over trash, most likely. He closed the window and listened to the message again. It had come in that very night.

  Floren Atxaga never read much before going to prison, but now he couldn’t stop. For that, if nothing else, he was thankful to that Cuban whore and her lawyer. Before, he’d seen books as nothing but two covers filled with dusty yellow pages. The only ones he’d even leafed through were the Bible and the book of psalms at church. Now he devoured books even if he didn’t always understand what they said. He’d started off with one that seemed appropriate: The Hive, by Camilo José Cela. It turned out to have too many characters and confused him. Another one, My Artificial Paradises, by Francisco Umbral, was complicated and had tons of words he didn’t understand, which made him mad. It was like the author was making fun of him. Now he was reading The Plague, by Camus, but it was so sad. Life wasn’t as bad as the guy made it out to be.

  Maybe he’d go back to the Bible. He felt safe there, he thought, anxiously flipping through half a dozen books that had been tossed into a dumpster without finding any that interested him.

  “What are you doing, man? Digging for food in the trash, like a rat?”

  Atxaga turned and saw a couple of teenagers. One was swinging a stick like a bat. The other gave him an insolent look, though Atxaga could have been the kid’s father. His pupils were dilated and his body twitched edgily. His mouth felt like it was full of bees, buzzing around. The kid was wearing a T-shirt that said something in English Axtaga couldn’t read.

  “I want everything you’ve got.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re looking at my shirt, right? That’s what it says: ‘I want everything you’ve got.’ ”

  Atxaga was pretty sure that wasn’t actually what it said, but this was the least of his worries. He was being held up. These little shits were holding him up.

  He observed them with a mix of rage and apprehension, two rivers that always ran parallel beneath the surface of his feelings. He thought they could be his sons, who would inevitably turn out the same way and end up robbing people if they stayed with their whore of a mother in a sleazy neighborhood like this.

  There was no way he was going to stand for it.

  He wasn’t excessively vicious. Atxaga detested violence, but sometimes it overtook him, like Jehovah when he tired of giving the chosen people opportunities. Then he would send them plagues, slaughter them, and hope they’d learn their lesson. But they didn’t learn; they never learned. And this forced him to be more and more exacting.

  By the time he stopped beating the kid with the stick, he was covered in blood. The kid dragged himself away like a dying rat, which was appropriate given that he’d called Atxaga one. He’d slammed the head of the kid in the T-shirt against a car fender. He didn’t kill either of them, just hoped they’d learned their lesson.

  “You force me to be a plague, and this
one is just the first.”

  He picked a book up off the ground, the pages wrinkled and spattered with blood.

  Two households both alike in dignity (in fair Verona, where we lay our scene). From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  He glanced at the title: Romeo and Juliet. Atxaga smiled; he liked love stories.

  That night, having parked himself in a doorway, as he watched the light in attorney Gonzalo Gil’s window, Atxaga discovered that he and Shakespeare had a similar view of things.

  Old Lukas gave a grumbling sort of growl, demanding to be taken for his walk.

  “All right, you old grouch.”

  Alcázar needed to clear his head anyway. He was no longer young and couldn’t sit at a computer and concentrate for as long as he used to. But he knew one thing: Siaka hadn’t left the country, at least not on any sort of ticket in his own name. What did that mean? Nothing. He could have crossed the border any number of other ways or used a fake ID. But something told him the kid was still in Barcelona.

  That afternoon he’d returned to the café-bar where Siaka was supposed to have met Gonzalo. It was the last place he’d been seen, as far as Alcázar knew. The waiter who had served him told Alcázar the same thing he’d told Gonzalo: good-looking, well-dressed black guy; he’d been in before, usually accompanied by an attractive tourist who looked like she had money, generally American or British and staying at an expensive hotel.

  “The women always paid, but when he came alone, he left unbelievable tips. He was a good kid, if a little eccentric.”

  “Eccentric how?”

  “He liked being called ‘sir.’ Pretty unusual for someone so young. I think all the five-star hotels he stayed in must have gone to his head.”