Just as had happened the first day with Héctor, and then with Jairo, I was telling Iago far more that I had intended. Tonight I attributed my oversharing to all the wine at the restaurant. Up until now I had always avoiding drinking at work-related dinners.
And with reason.
“Analyzing handwriting is a way to get people to tell me about themselves,” I continued. “I just study their general behavior. If they’re not talkative, I say they’re timid and like to be observers. Those two features usually go hand in hand. If, on the other hand, they’re talkative, they’ll be sociable, open, perhaps even impulsive.
“I picked Salva because he was wearing a medal of the Virgin of Carmen, so it was easy to deduce that he was a believer and link that to the letter d. He’s also very talkative, and that makes it more likely that he’ll tell you his life story without realizing it. First-year psychology, right? But the strange thing is that they all bite and shamelessly start to talk about their private lives without any reservations. In the end, they’ve always told you much more than you’ve worked out, but they go away thinking that it’s either you who’s guessed correctly, or graphology, or the lines on their palm.
“To summarize: it was part of my arsenal of social skills during my university years.” I sighed without being able to stop myself. “You can’t imagine how humiliating this evening has been for me.”
But Iago was standing beside me, shaking with laughter. “And you made him write a d, you cheat,” he said, smiling and moving his head from side to side.
“Hey, come on. The deal was, I provide an explanation, and you stop laughing at me,” I complained, giving him a dig with my elbow.
“Okay, okay. I’ll stop.”
“Fine.”
We walked on for a while in silence, until he broke it again. “You don’t have to justify your nonscientific interests. There’s nothing shameful about them. In fact, Héctor is a great fan of graphology, too. No doubt when I tell him, he’ll regret not having come to the dinner to see you in action.”
“Since when do you talk about me over matters that aren’t work-related?”
“Come on, Adriana, a woman like you must know that we men can’t help but talk about both your professional and nonprofessional facets.”
I said nothing by way of an answer and looked straight ahead at the twinkling streetlights, trying to prevent him from seeing the smile on my lips that was growing ever wider despite my best efforts.
We kept walking along the esplanade, sheltering under the stately row of white wooden balconies. When we reached the Hotel Bahía it stopped raining. The sea on the other side of the esplanade was a black expanse, barely visible on the horizon. We crossed in a direct line by the rotunda, ignoring the pedestrian crossing. There was hardly any traffic.
I stopped to rest for a minute under the Monument to the Santander Fire. It was a twenty-foot white-granite block carved with various larger-than-life male and female figures. The local residents didn’t pay much attention to the sculpture, but whenever I went past it, I remembered that, on the particular Sunday in 1989 when it was dedicated, my parents took me to see the event and bought me one of the famous Monerris ice creams along the way.
I told Iago, who was facing me and the monument with his hands in his pockets, smiling.
“It’s true,” he agreed. “All of Santander walks by it and no one actually sees it.”
A short time later we reached the entrance to my building, where an adolescent couple were leaning against the intercom, kissing. I cleared my throat, faking a dignity I was far from possessing at that moment, and Iago kept his glacier-blue eyes fixed firmly on the ground, holding back a smile. The kids disentangled themselves before our paternalistic gaze, making no attempt to hide their irritation. Once the way was clear, I attempted the simple task of opening the lock, but the bunch of keys had acquired a life of its own and I kept missing the target, thanks to my clumsy hands.
“Can you manage by yourself?” asked Iago with concern.
“Yes, don’t worry. I just have to find the key to the entrance.”
“Here, let me have them,” he said, taking the keys and trying them one by one until he found the right one and opened the door.
19
IAGO
Mother Moon Day, the tenth day of the month of Nion
Monday, February 27, 2012
Adriana had arrived somewhat later than eight o’clock, dressed like me in hiking boots and jeans. It turned out to be foggy, and the low clouds were threatening to treat us to a persistent drizzle. We had arranged to go together to the Monte Castillo caves and check out their Interpretive Center to glean some ideas.
When I saw her appear with her ponytail, which she rushed to release as soon as she came into my office, I smiled at the memory of those sober pant suits of her first few days. In just a few weeks, Adriana had adapted to the MAC dress code, which, as far as I could ascertain, was much more informal than at her previous place of employment. The Adriana who had emerged had a certain predilection for white tank tops like the ones construction workers wore, although when she wore them, the effect was arresting. The male half of the MAC staff were thoroughly distracted the days she saw fit to wear them to work, with me leading the way, I have to admit. I was absolutely certain that I wasn’t the only one who was becoming addicted to the way she walked and to every movement of her body, which provoked a reaction in those around her.
The tank top she was wearing on this particular occasion was stamped with a quotation from Walt Whitman: DO I CONTRADICT MYSELF? VERY WELL, THEN, I CONTRADICT MYSELF.
What a statement, Adriana, I thought with a smile.
When we left the building, Adriana put on the sweater she’d been wearing around her waist, and my libido finally took a breather. We got into my car, and I drove while she gazed in a distracted manner at the forest that still separated us from Puente Viesgo. On gray days Adriana’s eyes took on a darker hue than usual, although it seemed that her mood had also been infected with the day’s somber atmosphere.
“Is everything okay, Adriana?” I asked. I had been watching her with some concern out of the corner of my eye for a while. Adriana hadn’t said one word since she’d arrived at the museum.
“Yes, don’t worry,” she answered mechanically.
“Come on, what’s the matter?”
At last she turned her head, and I noted that every word she was saying was a struggle.
“It’s just that . . . I feel a bit uncomfortable about what happened at the dinner.”
“I don’t see why. It was entertaining.”
“I’m not talking about the graphology show. I wouldn’t do it again, but that’s not what I’m concerned about.”
“What is it, then?”
“What I’m really worried about is that I don’t remember if you came up to my apartment after, or only as far as the lobby.”
We were finally approaching something close to candor.
“I didn’t think you’d had that much to drink.”
“Neither did I. It’s been a while since I’ve had such a strong reaction to wine. But whatever caused it, I can’t remember for sure what happened that night. Could you clear it up for me once and for all, please?”
“You realize that if we had gotten involved that night, your question would be a very humiliating one for me,” I pointed out.
“Does that mean that nothing happened?”
Adriana remembered absolutely nothing. Perfect as far as I was concerned.
“I helped you unlock the main entrance, but then I let you go up to your apartment on your own. Reassure me that you didn’t bump into the edge of a piece of furniture or something like that.”
“Don’t worry; I don’t think so. Well then, nothing . . . um . . . inappropriate happened between us?”
“For heaven’s sake, Adriana, you s
ound like a young maiden from the nineteenth century.”
“So how do you explain that I woke up with your scarf around my neck?” she asked, taking it out of her bag.
There it was: the old “forgotten item” trick. There was no question I had left it with her quite deliberately. It was always the perfect way of continuing to be present when you were no longer there. I smiled to myself thinking that, when all was said and done, I’d have to thank the maestro, Jairo.
“Were you wearing just the scarf when you woke up?”
“Pardon?”
“Were you dressed or naked?”
“I was lying fully dressed on top of the bedspread.”
“You see? Then I didn’t come upstairs,” I said so conclusively that she preferred not to pursue her questions. “As far as the scarf is concerned, I lent it to you when we stopped under the streetlight so that you could read my palm. It was raining and you were getting soaking wet, so I covered your head with it. Is that what was worrying you?”
“I’m concerned in case it has repercussions at work,” she said bleakly. “Not just gossip, but professional repercussions. You see, up till now I’ve wandered from one place to another, but I came back to Santander with the intention of staying put. I’m not sure if you understand what I’m talking about. You’ve all got a stable project going here that will probably last you forever. I envy you that, in a sense. You’ve got your brothers, you’re among family, on your home soil. I’m starting to yearn for some stability. Maybe that’s why I’m paying more attention to not getting off on the wrong foot and doing everything well.”
“I can understand that, I really can. But Santander is a small town, and people talk no matter what. You and I will have to spend a lot of time together, especially over the next few months, so it would be better to forget about other people right from the start.”
She looked at me with an air of relief and finally smiled. “I guess you’re right. Anyway, I’ve found out what I needed to know.”
We were already approaching Puente Viesgo when we finally glimpsed the conical silhouette of Monte Castillo. The hill dominated the entire Toranza valley, which is why it had been the lookout point for herds of deer in Héctor’s time. By the time I was born, the snow-covered steppes and icy winds had given way to forests, so we spent the major part of the year camping on the move. Despite that, the Monte Castillo cave continued to be a refuge when the winters were hard—a sanctuary where our First Fathers still spoke to us, and a reference point to which we could return.
I drove up the slope of the hill to the parking lot while Adriana told me how her grandfather had been the custodian in the booth they’d installed at the entrance to the cave in the eighties, when they’d started up the archaeological excavations again.
“Your family is from around here?”
“Yes. You can see the family home from the top of the hill. Now that my grandfather is dead, my aunt and uncle live there.”
“Your family is from right here?” I insisted.
“Yes, from Puente Viesgo, from way back when,” she said, unaware how important the actual place was to me. “I used to come up here every day in the summer when I was little to spend some time with my grandfather,” she continued as we approached the Interpretive Center. “I’d watch the archaeologists go by, and I’d hang around them to see if I could learn anything. The people in town had always called Monte Castillo ‘the city of the troglodytes,’ so there was a real fuss when the archaeological finds kept coming.”
You as a child, and me, taking part in the dig as a Swiss research assistant. It seems this isn’t the first time we’ve been close, Adriana.
Back then the MAC didn’t even exist as a project, but my father and I tried to be involved in any dig that contained articles which had belonged to us in the past, in particular if it was taking place at Monte Castillo. We’d go independently with fake accreditation from some university, recover what was ours, and disappear again, just as we’d done in 1910, when the cave was excavated for the first time.
Adriana and I walked in silence until we reached the white awning that protected the entrance, although we paused at the small grass area in front of it first. Beside us the sculpture of a seven-foot-high biface welcomed all visitors.
“There it is,” said Adriana. “The homage to the Swiss army knife.”
She looked at me and laughed at my bewilderment.
“It’s just that I see the biface as prehistory’s multipurpose tool. Think about it: it was used to cut, scrape, pierce, pound—”
“Tenderize fillet steaks so they wouldn’t be so tough . . .” I continued.
“Do you think so?”
“How would I know? I’m just speculating.” I was always leading her into difficult-to-prove territory. I was determined to broaden her rigid view of the past. It bothered me that she was so inflexible, and that concern was a totally new sensation for me.
Why should it matter to you what she thinks, Urko? What difference does it make? But there was no question I felt a certain expectation when we crossed the threshold and together we entered the place where I’d spent my early childhood.
I greeted the security guard, and we gained entry to the site. The temperature inside the cave was a constant sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity was close to 90 percent. It had been always been like that: in the Monte Castillo cave you knew what to expect. The site was closed on Mondays, but Héctor had at some stage acquired a permit to gain access to the cave outside the times it was open to the public. On our left, a dig some sixty feet deep had exposed the innards of what had once been my home. We crossed the antechamber without paying any attention to it and made our way to the entrance of the actual cave, which was behind a metal door.
Ten thousand years earlier, on this very spot where we now walked, my clan had slept whenever it was snowing, lying on leaves brought in from the forest and ferns dried by the fire we lit to counter the damp. We kept the cold at bay with blankets made from deerskins.
We ought to have stopped off in the Interpretive Center to comment on the layout of the display cases, with their replicas of the batons of authority and the scapula with the deer engraving, and to discuss the usefulness of the information panels. We should, in short, have talked about all those things we had come to this place that morning to decide.
We ought to have, but that’s not what happened—far from it. Because the cave spoke to both of us, and there was no need for either of us to say anything to each other as we went down the stone stairways that modern man had hewn only decades earlier to make it easier to access the inner chambers. Adriana and I seemed to be drawn into the cave by similar instincts.
The first thing we saw, to the right of the Great Gallery, was the panel of handprints. My father’s clan had left the ochre outlines of some twenty hands. When something is ancient and permanent, it tends to be venerated. It becomes respected. No one was allowed to touch the images on the walls when I was born; we looked at them with the same religious fervor as the faithful who visit Covadonga or Fatima. But we were fortunate, because my father, then known as Lür, was present when they were done. He passed on their meaning to us, pretending that his mother had told him the story, and that she in turn had been told by her mother. Most of the stories were linked to ceremonies of belonging to the clan and the cave.
One night Lür told us the story of how a man and a woman had joined their hands with the rock in a ceremony before these very walls. It was not common in his time, but occasionally two members of the clan decided that they did not want to share their blanket with anyone else. Then the wise man of the clan would place one hand from each of them side by side on the stone surface and blow red ochre on them. “Now Mother Rock knows of your bond. Be worthy of her.” And from that moment, their right hands would always be painted with red so that the whole clan would remember that they belonged only to each other.<
br />
I remember that Lehena kept glancing at me that day while my father was speaking, and I answered her gaze with a determined look of my own. We had decided; it would be that night. We waited a few hours until the whole clan was sleeping. Someone was on guard at the entrance to the cave, but he had his back to us and we were able to creep toward the inner galleries of the cave without waking anyone up. We felt our way down the slippery slope until we reached that very wall. We were both still young, and Mother Moon hadn’t yet enabled Lehena’s first blood to flow, nor had the hunter’s mantle of hair yet grown on my smooth-skinned face. But Lehena and I could sense that those changes were imminent, and perhaps that was why we were reaching our last days of play. And it was leaning against these same rocks that we had exchanged our first caresses and thus learned what provoked moans in the other, cries we tried in vain to silence by covering each other’s mouth with kisses.
That night we repeated the sacred words with our eyes closed, and our adolescent hands were sealed only for the two of us. That night I penetrated her flesh for the first time, and thus it would be—only with her—until she died in childbirth several seasons later giving me my first daughter, Eder.
“Are you there?” Adriana’s voice cut through 103 centuries and reverberated in my brain.
“Yes, I’m still here,” I whispered. “Give me a moment. I’m overwhelmed, too.”
Adriana understood and was silent.
And then I realized that the spectacle wasn’t in front of me this time, but next to me.
Adriana.
She was gazing at the rock face in silence, captivated, and I could see that it was exercising its influence on her, too. Several times the narrowness of the passageways forced our hands to brush against each other. Several times, against my better judgment, I allowed myself to be carried along by the game of maintaining the contact a fraction of a second longer than necessary. Testing the waters, checking out her reaction with an unfathomable curiosity. Adriana, without any fuss, without any sign of unease, would subtly move her hand away.
The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1) Page 15