A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “She would never have allowed anything like that. Zinoviev acted on his own, he got spooked by how close Laura was getting and lost his nerve.”

  “You certainly seem convinced of this.”

  “To you and Laura, or to Alcázar and Agustín, Anna Akhmatova is the Matryoshka. But to me, she’s my mother, and I know her better than anyone. She would never do anything that barbaric.”

  “It was an atrocity not very different from the ones Laura was investigating, from the evidence she’d gathered on her laptop proving that your mother—venerable old woman that she is—is responsible for all sorts of dealings involving drugs, weapons, child prostitution, extortion, bribery…”

  Tania’s face darkened. “You’re judging me by her. Or maybe it’s her you’re judging by me. Couldn’t I just as easily say that your father was a murderer, a torturer, and a traitor—and the rapist of his own daughter?”

  Gonzalo took some time to order his thoughts. Until that moment, no one had articulated it so bluntly, so brutally—not Alcázar while the two of them were at Luis’s house after he let Siaka go, not Luis at the hospital.

  So his dreams about his sister in the shed weren’t, in fact, dreams. For years he’d refused to accept what his mind knew, deep down: the kind of man his father was, what happened that night and many others. The whole story about Franco’s police that his mother talked him into believing, the idea he’d formed based on invented or borrowed memories—all of it was but a sandcastle washed away with one word from Tania’s mouth. She’d spoken with no animosity, but without glossing anything over either. Perhaps the mythos that had been constructed by his own and others’ notions really did exist in part, but the man who was in the shed that night existed too, and Gonzalo’s attempt to pretend otherwise for so many years was now pointless. He hadn’t dreamed it. He’d lived it. And Laura, his sister, had never forgotten it.

  The pain had accumulated in her body, the body of a frightened girl who screamed every time the woman she became saw other children suffering the same fate. She’d been begging him to do something, to keep it from happening again. And he—blind, stupid, foolish—never understood that she’d protected him, that she’d taken sole responsibility for his safety, that she’d killed their father that night because she refused to let Elías lay a finger on him. All those years of bitter silence just so that he could live a life free of blame, of sin, sitting in judgment of her, writing Laura off because of the article in which, at least in part, she’d told the truth.

  The evidence of his injustice and the impossibility of redressing it made him recoil, there in Tania’s car. No matter how many Matryoshkas fell, how many people like Anna, Alcázar, and Agustín ended up rotting behind bars, nothing would ever put to rights the damage he had done, the terrible injustice of his love. He thought of Javier, whom he’d almost lost; of Lola and the way they had wasted their best years by not knowing how to forgive; of little Patricia, always so close to the edge of the pool, like one of those glowing fireflies waiting for tomorrow. And he wept.

  He wept like the little boy he’d carried with him for so long, hiding in his sister’s skirts, hands over his ears so as not to hear his father screaming, not to hear the beatings Laura received, not to hear his mother crying in the dark of her bedroom, hiding like a coward. He wept disconsolately for Laura, and for her son, and for all the children who had turned into versions of Siaka, and for those who would never make it that far, those who fell along the way.

  He wept because he would never again wear Esperanza’s jacket and fly, chasing his sister’s shiny hair, never again hear her laugh, or tease him, or get angry, or sing.

  Tania pulled him into her lap and stroked his graying hair, the hair of a man who’d grown up in fits and starts, naïve. And she loved him as she’d never loved anyone else in her life. And promised herself that she would do whatever it took to protect him. Whatever it took.

  The trees surrounding the residence were bare, a layer of gold on the paths and benches and the gazebo in the plaza. The weekend storm had been intense, stripping off the remaining leaves that had been holding out since fall. The weather had turned harsh, but Esperanza refused to give up her morning walks to the stone bench along the waterfront promenade, from where she looked out over the ocean. The wind was fierce, and it whipped through her gray hair, hiding her face. Cocooned in her jacket, diminutive, motionless, she blended in with the mist.

  Sometimes she thought about things, important things as well as frivolous things, and her thoughts came unbidden, with no warning, and then drifted off the same way. Other times, like that morning, she thought of nothing at all, her mind blank, and for this she was thankful. She could sit for an hour, hardly even blinking, gazing out at the gray occasionally interrupted by the outline of a boat or rock in the distance, the lighthouse beacons at the entrance to the port revolving continuously. And although she couldn’t see them, Esperanza heard the seagulls and the sound of the waves at high tide that almost kissed her toes. She felt the damp and cold penetrate her jacket, and beneath a thick black sweater her skin was icy. She didn’t worry about the tingling in her hands and feet that preceded her limbs going numb. It would take a long time to warm up again but she didn’t mind.

  She was old, and old people had ailments, and one of them would be the one to take her. That was her reasoning as well as her secret desire: that one day, as she sat there, far from her thoughts and memories, alone, her heart would say enough, and thus her long and eventful, disturbing, and blame-ridden life would end without fanfare. She’d done everything she had to do: Her things—if not her conscience—were all in order, her notebooks well organized, the letters to Elías tucked in the bottom of a drawer that Gonzalo would find when the time came. The night before, as the storm battered her bedroom window and thunder boomed and cracked in the silence, she’d even tried to make peace with what some people called God. She felt strange, trying to address something or someone she’d never taken seriously. It was hard to find the words, and she was self-conscious, imagining Elías laughing at her as she spoke those words, sitting in the chair at the foot of her bed.

  She’d seen him as though in a dream, sitting with his legs crossed, his one eye watchful and slightly mocking, his smile twisted, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. But she ignored the vision and kept trying to find a way to communicate with the supposed creator who made sense of everything everyone did in this life and the next—if there was such a thing as the afterlife. She spoke of her fear, of the things people do for love until they discover that love and enslavement are two different things though they sometimes feel the same.

  Should she ask forgiveness for having loved Elías more than what seemed humanly possible? Could that love justify her many complicit silences? Did Laura ever understand? Would Gonzalo understand now? Could her children ever forgive her?

  God had no answers to these questions, and Esperanza was thankful for his understanding silence. She tried to remember one of the prayers she’d been taught as a girl, an old lullaby about the baby Jesus playing with other children and sending them chubby little angels to protect the four corners of their dreams at night. And then, for hours, almost until dawn, she lay there in bed with her eyes open staring at the vision of Elías at the foot of the bed until—at first light—he stood, came over to give her a kiss and, before disappearing, said, “There is no heaven or hell, Esperanza. There’s only the ocean.”

  And now here she was, waiting for it to be her turn to become one with the ocean. She was convinced it would be today. She knew because that’s what she had decided. Today she would stop fighting and submit to death. A synergistic system.

  “Hello, Caterina. It’s been a long time.”

  Esperanza had no need to turn. She pursed her lips and shook her head in disapproval.

  “It certainly took you long enough,” she said in Russian.

  Anna Akhmatova gave her a de
fiant smile and a shrewd look. It had been thirty-four years since the night Esperanza showed up at her house with Elías’s body in the back of the car, but in essence she was the same woman, the same arrogant woman she had been back then. Not even when she’d come to ask a favor like the one she asked that night would she beg. Esperanza had hated Anna even before she met her, since the first time Elías showed her the locket with the photo of mother and child, Irina and Anna. And her hatred, like deadwood, was still getting in the way.

  “You’re still not thinking clearly,” Anna scolded, like a kindly sister.

  Esperanza adopted an abrupt manner, straightened her spine and held up a hand in sign of warning.

  “Save your sermons; we both know why you’re here, and if you’re expecting me to give you more than I can, then you still don’t understand after all these years.”

  Anna smiled, ignoring Esperanza’s admonition, delighted to have upset her. They were no longer living in heroic times, and Esperanza was no longer the woman who’d arrived that night with her inflammatory rhetoric, inveigling Anna, going on and on about the need to preserve the political and historical memory of Elías and the damage it would do if people found out what kind of man the hero they’d believed in all these years had turned into. Politics were nothing but a power play, and history showed no compassion, it just bulldozed over the indisputable deeds. And Esperanza needed to preserve both of them.

  That night Anna decided to help her, convinced by Esperanza’s rousing speech, but over time, when she found out what Elías was doing to Laura and what Esperanza was hiding, she realized that what the woman had really been trying to save that night was not the memory of her husband but the image of a perfect life that she’d constructed for herself. She was unwilling to accept anything but the fantasy of total faith, undying love, and absolute admiration. And the idea of not deserving any of those things was eating her alive.

  “You knew all along, or at least you suspected. You knew what was going on in the shed when Elías was drunk and enraged, but you refused to admit it because it would have forced you to act.” She paused before continuing hesitantly. “That night when you said it had all been a terrible accident, that Elías didn’t mean to do what he’d done, that your daughter had gotten scared and you couldn’t let her take the blame, you lied. You didn’t care about Laura, or what had happened. You were concerned only about your own prestige, about what people would say if they found out that a mother had allowed her daughter to be raped and abused by her father for so long.”

  It was easier, she continued, for Esperanza to pretend that it had been the police settling a score, or Stern’s henchmen. By that time everyone in the valley had heard about the shooting at the hotel and knew the police were looking for Elías. It wouldn’t be long before they found out about Igor’s record, and if Elías had murdered a mafioso or died at the hands of Franco’s police, the great man’s reputation would remain intact, his honor established. And Esperanza would be the guardian of his legacy, the Russian who came with him to Spain for love, the selfless mother, a modern-day Dolores Ibárruri, heroine of the cause who would nurture his legend year after year. And so Gonzalo had grown up believing all the things she’d carefully selected for him; in fact, everyone had—everyone but Laura.

  For some time, Esperanza’s daughter went along with the silence, horrified, perhaps paralyzed by what Esperanza caller her: murderer of her father. Caught in the web of silence tacitly woven by Esperanza and Anna, Laura felt trapped, suffocated by a lie that over time took on the weight of the only truth possible. On the rare occasion when she brought it up with her mother or tried to open her brother’s eyes, Esperanza called her crazy, a fabricator—Had she seen him die? Did she know where his body was?—and defended the line that his followers wanted to hear: The great man was killed by Franco’s police, who then got rid of the body.

  And Laura was the only obstacle in the way of this truth.

  “In the classic drama, the pendulum swings between forgetting, revenge, and the need for reparations. It’s clear you chose forgetting. Which is why you never forgave your daughter for writing that article about Elías years later, proving his ties to the Spanish police that started in 1947. But that wasn’t what concerned you most, was it?”

  “You’re not one to judge me.”

  “Are you kidding? I have every right to do just that. With her article, Laura was giving you one last chance to admit the truth. She wanted—she needed—to forgive you, and all you had to do in exchange was publicly admit the truth, tell the world, and especially Gonzalo, what had really happened. But you dug your heels in like the hardheaded, shriveled-up old woman you are. You chose to turn your back on your daughter. You made sure that all of her hatred and rage and pain focused instead on my business, on Igor’s legacy. I tried to help her, believe me, I wanted to protect her because I knew what she’d been through, knew where her self-destructive, messianic volatility came from. But she took things too far, and when Zinoviev felt cornered, he turned, like one of his attack dogs, and destroyed her…”

  Anna turned red, looking ashamed. Her own words had led her to a conclusion she would have preferred to avoid: that she was as guilty as Esperanza. There was no point denying it.

  “I want to atone for the damage we’ve done, to the degree possible.”

  “Very laudable,” Esperanza said tersely, “if a bit late.”

  Anna stood up and tucked her hair behind one ear. She gazed indifferently out at the gray sea and then looked uneasily at Esperanza. The woman was over eighty years old and had one foot in the grave but still clung obstinately to her absurd idea of dignity.

  “I’ll leave Gonzalo and his family in peace. I don’t care about whatever testimony he might give about the Matryoshka. They won’t find anything on me; I’m just a poor old bookseller. The wolves will come hounding me for revenge, of course, but I’ll give them Alcázar and Agustín. I think that’s just.”

  Esperanza shot her a mocking look. “Since when have we cared about justice?”

  Anna pretended not to have heard. The cold had seeped into her bones; it was as though she’d caught Esperanza’s chill, been infected by her agony. She was in a hurry to leave.

  “But I have one condition. And you’re the one who must fulfill it. It’s up to you whether or not your son and his family live.”

  It had been three weeks since Alcázar gave his testimony against the Matryoshka, three weeks since he was sentenced to prison without bail. Agustín had been charged, too, but had managed to stay out of jail for now by posting outrageously high bail, playing his last card with several friends, and calling in all favors. His father-in-law was alone now, Gonzalo knew this, and it was only a matter of time until he fell. Aware of how delicate the situation was, Lola had taken Patricia to the country house in Extremadura where her father was waiting it out.

  Gonzalo was more worried about Alcázar. He had little sympathy for the man, of course, but at the end of the day he’d saved Gonzalo’s life. Alcázar could have killed Siaka, too, gotten rid of the laptop and fled the country, run off to one of the Florida Keys he talked about every time Gonzalo visited him in jail. But instead he’d decided on what amounted to suicide, for there was no doubt that his testimony had been like signing his own death sentence. Alcázar was aware of that, of course, and he looked more anxious, exhausted, and drawn each time Gonzalo saw him.

  “Any day now, out on the yard, someone will appear out of nowhere and slit my throat. They won’t let me get far.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  Alcázar didn’t reply. A man’s reasons for doing something were none of anyone else’s concern.

  The last time he saw him through the glass partition in the visiting room, he noticed Alcázar had lost weight. To Gonzalo’s surprise, he had also shaved off his mustache and looked like a different man, almost innocuous, with a harelip he’d apparently been hiding all
these years. When Gonzalo was ready to leave, Alcázar called him back.

  “To answer your question: no. I would never have hurt your daughter, or let anyone else hurt her. I want you to know that.”

  Two days later, a prison guard found his body in the corner of his cell. He’d been beaten to a pulp and was curled up like a rat between his cot and the wall.

  In the days following, Gonzalo was given a police bodyguard, but the cop at Javier’s room wasn’t there for protection.

  “I think I’ll have a heart of glass for the rest of my life. Every time I breathe, I’m afraid it might break,” Javier said by way of greeting. He’d just been given conditional discharge. Gonzalo carefully helped him dress and then picked up his suitcase.

  Javier glanced over at the woman waiting in the hallway, visible through the half-open door. “She’s pretty,” he conceded.

  Gonzalo nodded. “I thought it was time you met. Tania is an amazing woman, in so many ways. I think you two will hit it off.”

  Javier frowned, eyeing the officer stationed outside the door.

  “Tell her to come visit me on Sundays at the detention center. We’ll have nine long years to get to know each other.”

  Gonzalo’s eyes enveloped his son in a protective mantle. Seventeen years couldn’t be undone in a few short weeks and he knew that bridging the distance between them would take a long time, but he wanted to show Javier that he was a new man, prepared to act like a father.

  “That won’t be necessary. Your grandfather and I have taken care of everything. You just stick to the story, okay? Carlos tried to extort you, you refused, and he pulled out a gun. You were defending yourself and accidentally shot him, and before he died he shot you. Alcázar has taken care of the evidence; it will corroborate everything. You won’t be held accountable.”

  Javier gave him a grave and steady look, one Gonzalo couldn’t read, and then sat back down on the bed and shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”