Out in the Open

by Jesús Carrasco

  In three strides he had reached the opposite wall, grabbed the nearest chorizo and held it in front of him in his two hands like someone about to coil up a rope. He stuffed the red meat into his mouth, undeterred by the spiciness or by the nervous state of his stomach. He simply surrendered to the savage instinct that says: eat first and worry about getting ill later. He devoured the entire sausage, swallowing bits of it almost whole, and when he’d finished, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, smearing it with grease and paprika.

  While he was gulping down the last piece, he paused for a while, studying the metal bar, wanting something different to sink his teeth into. Standing on tiptoe, he sniffed the salami, but it smelled slightly off. He then sniffed a blood sausage and was seduced by its fragrance, almost imperceptible amongst all the other smells. He tugged at the string and bit into the sausage and, as he did so, he heard a noise which, at first, he interpreted as the sound of a tooth breaking. He touched his cheek, but, feeling no pain, he spun round, like someone suddenly aware of being watched. His eyes explored the most brightly lit areas first and then the darker ones, some of which were plunged in impenetrable gloom. He could see nothing. He carefully put the sausage down on the table and stood – legs apart, ready for action, ears cocked like a horse – in the middle of the rectangle of light flooding in through the window onto the tiled floor. He turned round very slowly and that was when he saw him.

  He was lying inside the pantry located in one corner of the room, concealed behind a patterned curtain. The curtain did not quite reach the floor and underneath it he could see what appeared to be an elbow. He took shelter behind the table, waiting for something to happen. He kept his eyes fixed on that elbow, but saw not the slightest movement nor heard the slightest sound. At first, he thought the owner of the elbow, possibly the cripple, might be asleep, only to realise that no one in his right mind would choose to take a nap in such a place. Perhaps it was a drunk or someone, like him, who had come in search of those sausages or the wine in the earthenware pitcher. He looked around for something he could use to lift the curtain without having to get too close. He found a long pole with a kind of pincer at the end, like the one used by the shopkeeper in the village to reach the highest shelves. He picked it up and approached the pantry. When he was about six feet away, he reached out the pole and with the pincer end touched the curtain. However, he couldn’t sustain the weight of the pole held at full length and one end dropped down, accidentally striking what must have been the head of the man behind the curtain. He again drew back and waited for some response, but nothing happened. The light coming in through the window by which he had entered seemed to lend volume to the air. Outside that block of light, in the spot where he could now see that elbow, and in all the other shadowy corners, unimaginable dangers lurked.

  Trembling, he again reached out the pole to the curtain. This time he managed to pull it aside and immediately recognised the cripple’s face. The wound was still there on the man’s forehead, like a brand. In his efforts to reveal the whole body, he tugged so hard that the metal curtain rail came off at one end. Rail and curtain fell to the ground with a dull thud. The dust from floor and curtain flew up like pigeons startled by a passing horse, then dissolved into the darkness.

  The cripple’s naked body reminded him of a full wineskin, completely hairless and with scars like stitching on his rounded stumps. He went over to the body and with the tip of his boot touched the man’s stomach, chest and shoulder, but there was no response. Bending down, he grabbed the man’s chin and shook his head. He opened the man’s eyelids and found only two blank spheres the colour of yellowing ivory. He walked backwards, his eyes still fixed on the man, until he collided with the wall, where he sat down.

  He studied that formless body for a long time, wondering if he had been the one to kill him. After all, the last time he had seen him, that had been an option. True, he hadn’t acted on that option and the cripple had only been unconscious, not dead, when he left him by the water tank. Given his physical limitations, however, and the inhospitable nature of the place, he could easily have died there. He stared hard at the man’s chest to see if there was any sign of breathing, but there was nothing in him now that could fill his lungs. The boy struggled to understand what could have happened, but he only had room in his head for the idea of death. He had heard a lot about death, although usually only in the priest’s sermons. The Egyptians dying in their thousands beneath the waters of the Red Sea, Herod massacring the innocents, or Jesus crucified on Golgotha. But this was quite different, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He spent a couple of hours contemplating the corpse, marvelling at its shapes and paralysed by the gravity of what he could see. During that time, the afternoon light softened and things in the room grew dimmer. And even though he had hardly slept the previous night, he did not succumb to sleep. While he was studying the cripple, he couldn’t even thread two thoughts together, his mind entirely occupied with his contemplation of that strange sight. It would not have taken much for him to remember the hoofprints heading off in different directions from the water tank where he had left the cripple. And yet he didn’t even notice the purple line around the cripple’s neck, clearly left by a noose, nor did he ask himself why the body was naked. He didn’t realise the danger he was in and remained in that stunned state until he heard something scratching at the door.

  He leapt to his feet and stood with his back and the palms of his hands pressed against the wall. When he identified the noise as coming from an animal scratching at the wood, he relaxed. He went over to the door and opened it a crack. The goatherd’s dog was gazing up at him, wagging its tail, its tongue lolling. He opened the door fully to welcome the dog, which jumped enthusiastically up at him. As he had done so often before, the boy bent down and scratched the dog under its chin. From that position, he could see the legs of a man sitting on the bench outside one of the windows and, realising who it was, he sprang back, intending to shut the door.

  He had nearly succeeded when the boot of another man thrust itself in between door and door frame. The boy kept trying to push the door shut, but the boot stopped him. When he realised that he couldn’t close the door, he ran towards the back of the house to make his escape through the window he had entered by. He saw the rectangle of light, the fading afternoon sun outside and, in the distance, the church. He tried to jump from the window and would have made it if the bailiff’s man had not been waiting for him, having run round the house from the front. He was holding a double-barrelled Beretta shotgun with ivory inlay. The boy managed to draw back in time, only narrowly avoiding falling into the man’s arms, but coming close enough to penetrate the alcoholic aura surrounding him. The same sickly smell he had so often smelled on his father when he came back from the bar at night. He barely had time to look at the man’s face, and yet his image remained engraved on his memory: the gingerish hair, the sweaty, greying beard, the empty blue eyes and, above all, the tip of his greasy nose covered in a network of bulging blue veins.

  He turned round, because although he had exhausted all escape routes, something inside him was nonetheless hoping that the ground would open up beneath him or that the walls might suddenly sprout new doors. Instead, what he found under the inn’s fragile roof was the dapper, feline figure of the bailiff. The sight shook him to the marrow.

  ‘Well, look who’s here.’

  The bailiff took off his hat and smoothed his hair.

  ‘Have you seen this, Colorao?’

  His deputy nodded, leaning his elbows on the window ledge, and he continued nodding as he examined the room. He gave the same degree of attention to the roof beams as to the cripple’s naked body and, when he had inspected every corner of the room, he gestured to the bailiff, indicating the sausages hanging from the bar. Still without taking his eyes off the boy, the bailiff grabbed a sausage and threw it to his colleague. The man missed, and the sausage struck one of the panes of glass and fell to the floor. Resting his be
lly on the window ledge, the man stretched down to reach the sausage. He picked it up, wiped off any bits of glass with his sleeve, then walked away, chewing on the tough meat.

  The bailiff also scanned the room as if it were a place full of memories for him, then went to the back window. Stepping over the broken glass on the floor, he gazed out at the plain. Then, as if a storm were approaching, he reached for the shutters, pulled them to and put the catch on. The dog had come into the house and was lying at the boy’s feet, sniffing at the puddle that had formed there.

  Someone tapped on the shutters and the bailiff opened them again.

  ‘Any chance there might be something in there to drink, boss?’

  The bailiff’s deputy again leaned on the ledge while the bailiff searched the room. The deputy looked the boy up and down, as if imagining what was about to happen to him. The bailiff returned and handed him a half-gallon flask of wine.

  ‘Now go away and don’t bother me again.’

  The deputy uncorked the flask and tossed the cork into the room. Hooking two fingers round the wicker handle, he rested the flask on his forearm, which he then lifted to his lips before taking a long, long drink. The bailiff said tetchily:

  ‘Don’t overdo the wine, all right? You’ll have work to do in the morning.’

  The deputy lowered the flask and gave the bailiff a leering grin, his eyes bleary and heavy-lidded. Staring at some vague point in the room, he belched loudly, then turned and left.

  ‘Useless bloody drunk,’ muttered the bailiff, leaning out over the ledge to close the shutters again. When he had drawn the bolt, he pushed at the shutters just to make sure they were securely closed. He looked through the slats of one of them, then turned round, the broken glass again crunching beneath his boots. From there, he studied the boy from head to toe, as if regarding some tasty morsel.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, boy. Nothing’s going to happen to you.’

  The bailiff smiled and added: ‘Nothing new anyway.’

  Very slowly, he crossed the room and when he reached the boy’s side, he bent down, picked up the dog’s lead, led the dog over to the door and shut him outside. Before closing the door again, he saw his deputy meandering down the street towards the entrance to the village. In one hand, he was holding his shotgun and, in the other, the flask from which he took long, regular draughts. The bailiff closed the shutters on the front of the house too, and the room was left in darkness. A few grim seconds passed during which all the boy could hear was the man moving about somewhere in the room. Then the bailiff flicked on his lighter and, with it, lit a large tallow candle that the boy hadn’t noticed before. Then he walked around the room, picking up whatever bits of food he fancied – smoked pork, chorizo and ham as well as the bottle of olive oil. He poured some wine from the large pitcher into a smaller earthenware jug and placed it on the table. When he went over to the pantry, he had to kick one of the cripple’s arms out of the way in order to get a tin plate and a glass from a shelf. He also helped himself to a handful of breadsticks from a jar. When he had everything he needed, he sat down and started to eat as if he were entirely alone. He cut slices of sausage to eat along with the breadsticks, occasionally adding a drizzle of olive oil.

  While the man was eating, the boy remained standing, head bowed. His wet boots, his grimy skin, the smell of the food, an end to his bold adventure. He took for granted the coming nightmare and didn’t cry, because he had been here dozens of times before. It was a matter of indifference to him now whether the bailiff killed him or took him back to the village. His fate was decided, as was that of the goatherd.

  By the time the man had finished eating, the pinprick pattern of light from the shutters had faded completely. He pushed away what remained of his food with one arm, then got up. He grabbed a handful of walnuts from a sack leaning against one of the walls and deposited them on the part of the table he had just cleared. He sat down again and cracked them open, sticking the point of his knife into the base of each nut and turning it until the shell split in two. Then, despite his large fingers, he managed to scoop the kernels out almost whole and put them in a bowl. All this time, the boy stood motionless. The puddle at his feet had seeped into the grouting around the tiles, but his trouser legs were still wet and he could feel a slight numbness in his calf muscles.

  ‘It’s important to do things properly.’

  The bailiff made this remark while holding one half of a nutshell in each hand. Then holding each half between two fingers, he put them together so that they fitted perfectly like a brain with four hemispheres.

  ‘And you haven’t.’

  The boy continued staring at the wall, transfixed by the magnetic presence of the bailiff and by his memories of him. Those memories swam around like catfish at the bottom of a well of black water.

  ‘How often have I told you not to tell anyone else about us?’

  ‘I haven’t said anything to anyone.’

  The boy lifted his head slightly, and there was a note of almost childish complaint in his voice.

  ‘What about the goatherd?’

  The bailiff took a bite out of a walnut, then returned it to the bowl. The boy said nothing, trying as best he could to play a role that was no longer his.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I mean the old man you’ve been travelling with these last few days. Or do you expect me to believe that you got here all on your own?’

  Then the boy’s legs gave way beneath him and he sank to the floor, feeling utterly helpless, even more helpless than when his father had taken him to that man’s house for the first time and left him there, at the mercy of his desires. He shrank in on himself, as if trying to unite two wetnesses, the damp floor and his own moist eyes. The liturgy, so often repeated, was starting all over again: the bailiff sitting down, placing one foot on his knee in order to untie the laces on his boots, which he then picked up by the heels and placed neatly on the floor. Pushing the chair to one side and getting to his feet in order to unbutton his shirt. Walking over to him, bare-chested.

  ‘Stand up.’

  The boy obeyed and stood before him, head still bowed.

  ‘Raise your head.’

  The boy did not move, head down, fists and toes clenched.

  ‘I’m ordering you to look at me.’

  Up until then, the boy had managed not to cry, but now he suddenly let out a sob.

  With one hand, the bailiff smoothed the boy’s matted hair. He stroked his neck and ran the back of his fingers gently over the boy’s wet cheeks. The man then raised his fingers to his lips and tasted the mixture of salt and soot and tears.

  ‘Look at me.’

  The bailiff tried to force the boy to lift his head, but again, the boy resisted.

  ‘Okay, if that’s how you want it.’

  He then propelled him towards the table and ordered him to place his hands wide apart on the wooden tabletop. Tears spilled forth from the boy’s swollen eyes and rolled grimily down his cheeks into the bowl of walnuts.

  The candle, which, by now, had almost burned down to nothing, cast harsh shadows of their bodies onto walls and ceiling. Behind him, the boy heard rhythmic movements and the bailiff’s heavy breathing.

  Suddenly, the candle went out, and the man gave a snort of annoyance. In the dark, he fumbled around in the corner where he had found the candle, but, failing to find what he wanted, he went over to the pantry. He stepped over the cripple’s dead body and picked up the fallen curtain. He tore a couple of strips from it and went back to the table, twisting them in his fingers. He poured some olive oil onto his plate and arranged the two strips of cloth to form a cross, making sure these were thoroughly soaked in oil. Then, like someone twirling a moustache, he twisted the ends so that they stood upright to form four points. He felt for his lighter in his jacket pocket, flicked it on and held the flame to the bits of cloth until four small crackling flames appeared. The new light lit up the room, and the boy could see the ba
iliff’s boots next to his chair, his shirt draped over the back. The man again positioned himself behind the boy and was just about to start again, when someone knocked at the door.