Silent Island

by Pablo Poveda

  Shit. I did it again.

  That moment of reflection took me back to the room where the small radio was playing, and I recognized a classical symphony. I had heard it at school when I was a kid, and we had been made to play it on those cheap plastic recorders. Music at school was a failure on the part of the students as well as the teachers. Ordering children to learn music was like forcing them to paint the Gioconda. The recorder was perhaps the least significant instrument ever conceived by mankind. I heard the melody and hummed along. Unlike pop music, classical compositions lacked scores. They had a different purpose, and that might be the reason why the less educated did not appreciate classical music. I was getting lost in myself, not afraid of not ever finding myself again. Then my phone rang in another room.

  “Hello?”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” a female voice said. She seemed angry about something.

  “Is that you, Clara?” I asked. “How are you?”

  “Why didn’t you go to the apartment?” she asked. I noticed a hint of nervousness in her voice. I heard someone kicking a can down the street. I was drunk and could not focus. I went back into the living room and turned off the radio. “Why didn’t you do as I told you, Gabriel?”

  “Just a moment,” I said and heard the can in the background, rolling. The clanking against the curb was getting me nervous. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  Clara sounded upset, and I was asking random questions while still feeling lost within myself. “Listen, we should meet. I don’t like that Cornelius, you know?”

  “Get rid of the girl,” Clara replied, “she’ll only bring you trouble.”

  “Who is he?” I asked with curiosity. “Where does he live?”

  “The documents. Go to the apartment.”

  “I’m fed up with your showing up like this, unannounced,” I said. “I could be dead.”

  “You are nothing but a cheap journalist,” she whispered, “a shitty reporter.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She’s not Estrella,” she said. “Homespun reporter — ”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I replied. “Crazy bitch.”

  “All men are jerks,” she concluded.

  Suddenly, the call ended, and I was left there standing in silence. The pants felt tight, and I felt suspended in the air. I returned to the apartment, to my physical self, walking away from that voice, that absolute void. I came out of the trance, the noise of the can had already ceased.

  I was stunned.

  The telephone vibrated. It had run out of battery. I checked the duration of the call.

  The counter indicated fifty minutes, although I had the feeling that it had lasted no more than two.

  Where had I been all this time?

  * * *

  A few hours later, Blanca and I were on the same street where I had gone with Clara days before. In front of the café, there was only a young couple having coffee, an old man in a striped shirt reading the newspaper, and the same mustachioed waiter. There was no use in regretting having taken the call.

  I looked at Blanca. Beautiful, disheveled, and attractive.

  Summer suited her better than it did me.

  She was the exact opposite to me. Her gait portrayed a vitality and willingness to face problems as they came. Unlike her, I was a coward, a tough man with little to lose, but a coward, nonetheless. I looked at her, and she pointed to the landing. I reached into my pocket and rattled the keyring to show her that I was there for the same reason and not to waste time.

  We crossed the threshold. It was an ordinary dirty entrance with marble tiles and rubber marks from bicycle wheels.

  “Let’s take the stairs,” Blanca said. “I hate elevators.”

  I did not complain, nor did I ask her if she had trouble with small spaces. It could be anything. I remember the story of a girl who was attacked in an elevator. She must have had it bad. Since then, she only used the stairs. She did not mind how many stories she had to go up or down. The idea that she could always run, and thus have an exit route, comforted her. I know that because I wrote a story about her for the newspaper. Years later, the girl majored in engineering and worked on a project on escalators in private buildings.

  It would have been easier to carry a taser gun in the handbag.

  We reached the third floor, and I took the keys from my pocket. It smelled of dust and solitude. The hallway light had blown out. Blanca opened the elevator door and pressed all the buttons. We looked around and saw nothing. I checked the keyring; it had the same number written on it that was on the door in front of us.

  “It must be here,” I said. “Are you sure about this?”

  Blanca nodded. I was nervous about what we might find inside, whereas she was excited to break the tedium of normality.

  The doubts startled me, I wanted to delay that moment as much as I possibly could.

  I looked at the back of her head and her forehead. I looked at her like a father looks at his daughter, wondering if she had already slept with Cornelius, but I was not her father, nor did I feel compassion or hatred for anyone but me. I looked at her like that because I wanted to be in the place of that bastard.

  I inserted the key and turned it twice. I pushed the door, and a stream of light coming from outside the block burst into the apartment. I looked at the floor, it was stained in red. The air had a strange damp metallic smell.

  It was familiar, had I been there before?

  Impossible.

  When I opened the door all the way, I learned where it came from.

  A pool of blood covered the doorway. The body of a dead girl, clothed and with her limbs sprawled, lay on the wet floor.

  I looked at Blanca. I wanted to vomit right there.

  The smell was strong and intense.

  I recalled the day of the factory.

  Blanca did not say a word and walked into the apartment.

  “Come,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

  Her voice echoed in my ears.

  * * *

  Her pale skin acquired a purple hue under the contrast of the light that entered the room. It was a girl whose soft and smooth face would never blush again upon hearing a compliment. Muscles and limbs had stiffened and gotten cold; puddles of coagulated blood lay around her. Her face was pale, and her golden hair rested ruffled on her forehead. Her eyes had no color for they had been gouged out by a ruthless evil actor. Her empty eye sockets were exposed and had bled out, forming a scab that covered her face. Despite everything, her unsettling smile was sweet, considering the Botox around her lips.

  Blanca Desastres entered the apartment. I crossed the threshold and slammed the door shut quickly to prevent anyone from catching us there.

  An intense pressure took hold of my chest, preventing me from breathing, and at the same time, I felt an imperious need to light a cigarette and pour bottles of alcohol in my throat. The world, life, and my existence boiled down to a minuscule speck in space without the slightest relevance while I contemplated that girl on the floor. She was the embodiment of my demise, Blanca’s, and that of all who ever set foot on this planet. I held on to my life and feared losing it. Now more than ever, I feared for my life. That is all that it was about, a frugal dependence, intrinsic, that since the moment we were born, had turned into an onion — a core surrounded by layers of absurd needs, consumerism, and moral and existential dilemmas. Death is a fact of life, but facing it is always seen as a major ordeal.

  However, as gruesome as it was, there was something odd in that picture. The girl was dressed and seemed to be lying in a carefully studied position, becoming part of the decor. It was much like someone who places a vase in a corner or straightens a picture frame. She was part of the scene like a kitchen cabinet and aligned with the distribution of the furniture in the apartment. I deduced that someone must have moved her body and left it in that position. Perhaps that was the doing of two people or more. It was clear that the body
was there for display purposes. The way they had positioned that woman’s bust was a signature in and of itself.

  Her smile also caught my attention. Despite having her eye sockets emptied, the girl was smiling. There are people who find pleasure in experiencing pain, but that would have been an extreme. If the girl had been capable of smiling, even while her organs were being removed, she must have been sedated somehow. I looked at her hands, also covered in dry blood. The idea that she might have taken her own life was out of the question.

  Finally, there was her torso, slashed and pierced. They had used a medium-size knife, probably a kitchen knife.

  “These bastards,” said Blanca, walking around the body. “I have no words.”

  “I think I’ll throw up,” I said in an effort to contain the nausea. “Take some pictures.”

  Blanca took out her camera and took volleys of photographs of the body.

  She stood in front of me.

  “Are you alright?” she asked. I assented, feeling weak. I felt I was about to faint but made an effort to stay up. A dark hue flooded my visual field and filled it with sparkling electric worms that wiggled like imaginary spermatozoa.

  I went to the kitchen and poured myself some water in a glass. I could hardly stand it.

  “I told you to stay out of it,” I told Blanca chokingly.

  “Who’s the girl?” she asked. “Did you know her?”

  Nimbly, without even thinking I told her I did not. I did not want to look at her much, for I would faint, knocked out like a boxer if I did. For some reason, and without an explanation, Blanca insisted as many as three times.

  “Did you know her, Gabriel?” she said again. “Answer, did you know her?”

  I denied it several times, and when the nausea had disappeared, I took another sip of water, left the glass in the sink, and looked at the body again.

  Of course, I did not want to look at her.

  Beads of cold sweat ran down my forehead.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know her.”

  But I was lying.

  The words cluttered in my mouth, one on top of the other, like a group of swimmers being circled in by a shark. I turned around, put my cursed words in the deepest of my heart, and locked them in, tossing the key away in my subconscious. That unfortunate gutter of the mind that sometimes clogged and got overflown by emotional sewage.

  In my mother tongue, her name meant star, and the irony was that she had would never shine again. That is the very same reason I hid our relationship from Blanca, I just could not explain it in a way that made any sense. We were two strangers, had always been, and it had better remain that way. Estrella was a force of nature, bright, and beautiful like her eyes, but tormented. I did not understand what she was doing there nor how she had met that fate. Estrella sought fame and professional recognition. She had worked in newspapers and television. She carried two 250-gram implants under each breast — I had touched them myself — smooth and hard like two beach balls. Estrella was the first girl with implants I had been with. We had a fling, not the way I would have expected, but the story wrote itself one winter afternoon.

  Back then, I was new at the newspaper. I had been assigned a footwear exposition in a small town on the outskirts of the city. Nobody wanted to work on Saturday, and my social life back then was non-existent, so I volunteered, collected the travel expenses, and attended. I had to take a bus, and then a taxi to get to a small hotel the company had booked for us. It was a villa a little secluded from the town. There was not much to do, and I did not fully understand how it related to the newspaper either.

  Most journalists there worked for specialized magazines and digital editions. I recognized some political figures. Everybody seemed to have put the quarrels aside. People always found truces when it came to eating and getting drunk. I took a walk in the surrounding area and did not see anything interesting. I took a shower, got dressed. I was still young and gullible — I had a lot to offer and learn — and wore a suit to go unnoticed without being taken for a lame and tacky reporter. Estrella was young too, a few years younger than me. She worked in the communication department of the organizing company. I did not need to have a particular insight to know how she had gotten that position. The way the supervisor — who happened to be one of the speakers — looked at her was, simply put, revealing.

  We met at the catering next to the canapés. Starving and bored, I was hoping for someone to drink one too many and give information to make a decent note. I was not particularly motivated, feeling I was wasting my time. The only upside was the extra pay. Estrella saw me at the end of the room, and I noticed her slender legs and dark knit stockings. I looked at her open blouse and her bulging breasts that glistened under the light of the halogen lamps.

  From the cocktail, we moved on to have dinner at a restaurant in the same building as the presentation. The company intended to flex muscle before the competition and wanted to make it clear that they could bury us in gift checks.

  The show ended, and there was a party in the same room, a celebration enlivened by a tasteless DJ, a bar full of bottles, and drinks that were on the host’s account.

  Drunker, I ran into Estrella again and told her how pretty her legs were. I was convinced that she had heard that millions of times, but I thought that it would be far more original to compliment her legs than her eyes or even her operated breasts. We held a superficial conversation, and without further questions, she gave me her room number. She did not look like the kind of easy girl that one could sleep with in the first stroke of luck, but quite the opposite. I took a drink and turned around to see what Estrella was looking at so intently that she stopped paying attention to me.

  I had no intention of messing there with anyone, but after seeing the same man who looked at her lustfully hours earlier, I understood everything. Her boss was flirting with another woman, possibly another guest. Estrella was sad, hurt in the soul, and was going to commit an act of rebellion typical of a romantic drama. She was spiteful, and I happened to be there at that moment, next to her, the easy resource, but it could as well have been anyone else. The result did not matter. She was willing to get even and get a payback for all the overtime, travel expenses, and dinners at the restaurants along the seaport. She wanted to pay him back the same way, so that she could feel less irrelevant, not knowing that she would get even more hurt.

  Gently, I touched her fingers slowly; first, her index, and then the rest. It was a gentle gesture, and I moved her chin toward me.

  “You are worth more than that,” I told her. “Don’t do this.”

  Estrella finished her drink, and a small tear ran down her cheek and to her upper lip. I accompanied the sway of her gym hips to room 75.

  The rest is history. We had sex, and later, I left the room while she was still sleeping. I did not want to exacerbate the malaise of her hangover with my presence, reminding her of an action that she would surely regret afterward. Seeing my face upon waking up would probably traumatize her. Without taking a shower nor having breakfast, I took a taxi that drove me to the town and a bus that took me to the city. The next thing I knew about Estrella was that she had joined a local television channel as editor in chief. Estrella got out and rose from the ashes.

  Maybe, the regret of having slept with me changed her forever.

  I never knew.

  She never called me.

  She did not have my phone number. In fact, I even gave her a fake name.

  She thought that I was a handsome and wealthy young entrepreneur, but I only was what she wanted me to be that night.

  When I saw her on the floor, I thought that she might have done it again, just a bit too far this time. Estrella’s light had died out forever, like a cigarette butt on an ashtray, consumed until the only thing left was a filter smeared in lipstick.

  * * *

  Time started flowing backward, counting the minutes before I fainted in that apartment. With Estrella’s body on the floor, we moved the bed to o
ne side and pulled out the box that Clara had indicated. My hands and legs were shaking. My stomach was getting upset, and I feared I would soil my pants. Blanca seemed relaxed and calm, as if having a cold body nearby did not make any difference.

  When we moved the bed, we found nothing underneath. But a tile seemed to be out of place.

  “Here it is,” Blanca said. She grabbed a wooden lamp resting on the night table and hit its body against the tile. The lamp broke.

  “Great,” I said ironically. “Let’s try to pry it with the fingers.”

  The slits were narrow and uncomfortable. My fingertips hurt. I exerted as much pressure as I could, but the edges slipped.

  “What do we do now?” Blanca asked.

  I walked to the kitchen and looked at Estrella’s face again. It was grayish, her eye sockets empty, and her lips drew half a smile. I wished she had had a dignified, sweet, late, and dull death. I looked under the sink for a hammer or a tool to hit the tile. Fruitlessly, I proceeded to open the drawers. My heart raced like a locomotive inside of me. I found a wrench in the pantry. I did not even wonder what it was doing there, what kind of person keeps a wrench in the pantry. That was the very same apartment where Hidalgo probably spent the most meaningful moments of his life in the last years, where he and Clara slept together. If Hidalgo was a tenant, there must be a landlord who collected the rent. I wondered who that might be and where the hell he was at that moment. I could sense Hidalgo’s ghost wandering in the rooms. Was he watching me? Did he mean to communicate something with me? The air blew through the kitchen window that was open. Who opened it? Did you, Antonio? That place was driving me mad.

  “Gabriel, what the hell are you doing?” Blanca said from another room.