“You fancy one of the girls, don’t you?” Soleá said to him one evening with her eyes half closed.
“I do?”
“Otherwise why d’you come to the cave every single night?”
“To see you, Soleá,” he replied.
“Stop messing with me, Míster Crasman, I know what you’re like.”
Granny Remedios had picked up on this state of tension and disillusion—if nothing else, old age brings wisdom—and she thought the gringo could do with a little nudge to help him win Soleá over. The old woman knew Soleá was ready to be won over, you could see it from the way she came down in the morning all done up and asking for him—Where’s Míster Crasman, is he up yet? So she lay in wait until the opportunity arose to intervene in her granddaughter’s fate.
In the first week of August, Atticus received a call from England. His father wanted to know how he was getting on. Atticus had no choice but to lie. He made something up about studying the business and assured him that he would have good news soon. Then he asked if his father knew of anywhere in Spain that sold Twinings Earl Grey, his favorite kind of tea, because otherwise he was going to have to order some from England, which would be complicated. His father promised to find out, and they hung up.
Because this conversation took place in the courtyard, Manuela, Remedios, and the girls couldn’t help listening through the kitchen window and asked Soleá to translate what the míster was saying to his father.
“He’s not talking about us,” Soleá explained. “It seems he’s run out of tea and wants to buy more.”
“Tell him there’s a woman who lives on the way up to Antequera who makes herbal teas!” her grandmother suddenly exclaimed.
“But Granny Remedios,” said Soleá in surprise, “they sell the kind of tea he wants in all the supermarkets.”
“You tell him,” the old woman replied, “then I’ll explain how to get there. Tico!” she shouted out the window, “come over here. I’ll tell you where you can get some lovely tea!”
Two days later, on August 10 at precisely 8:00 p.m., Atticus Craftsman went on the strangest adventure of his life, driving Arcángel’s truck with Soleá fanning herself at his side, the picture of Camarón staring at them from the windshield while his voice strained to be heard over the noise of the motor. Before they set off, Atticus took out his cell phone, called home, waited for the tone, and when he heard the answering machine kick in he decided to leave a message so that his father wouldn’t waste time with an exhaustive investigation of Spanish tea distributors: “Leave it to me, Dad. I’ve got it all under control.”
CHAPTER 38
Señá Candela had discovered the calming effects of valerian, the hallucinogenic properties of jimson weed, the digestive qualities of chamomile, and the therapeutic benefits of quinine long before herbalist’s shops, artichoke tablets, and Schweppes tonic came into fashion. The only thing that took her by surprise was the appearance of Coca-Cola—so similar to the sarsaparilla root beer they had always drunk and yet so successful. She had spent many years investigating the therapeutic properties of wild herbs, but she would never have imagined that such benefits could be reaped from selling them wholesale. She only ever asked for a donation in return for her masterly formulas, and the line that formed outside her house stretched around the block. Her husband, Agustín, kept an eye on the variety of people, some in pain, others heartbroken. Unlike his wife, he took advantage of the clients, whom he arranged not in the order of their arrival—which would have been the fair way to do it—but according to the tip he pocketed, so that the rich always went before the poor. Señá Candela turned a blind eye, because she didn’t want Agustín to leave her at this late stage of the game—she was well over eighty—but in return she dedicated much less time and energy to the first in the line than the last.
“Give Agustín fifty euros and tell him to put you at the back,” Granny Remedios told Soleá, knowing that plenty of people had already worked out about the difference in treatment and did their best to stay at the back of the line.
As a result, it was a strange sort of line that formed. At the front were the rich outsiders, who were oblivious of the mad logic whereby the more you gave, the worse off you were. Then came the poor from the village and those from elsewhere. Then the rich from the village and, finally, the few who were able to precisely calculate their place in the line relative to the size of the bribe they gave.
Agustín pocketed the fifty euros that Soleá gave him and then put the three or four clients who arrived later in front of them, despite their protests.
“I don’t get it,” said Atticus.
“Because you’re English, Míster Crasman, and you lot have a different way of lining up.”
The house was identical to all the others, whitewashed, with iron bars in front of the two windows that faced the street. The door was open, but to get inside you had to pass through a beaded curtain that tinkled musically. The interior smelled like boiled vegetables.
“What’s cooking, Señá Candela?” Soleá asked as the old woman kissed her affectionately.
“Cabbage for dinner,” she replied jokingly before looking Atticus up and down. “So you’re Soleá, our Remedios’s granddaughter,” she added, “and this is the Englishman.”
“Míster Crasman,” said Soleá before Atticus had time to open his mouth.
Atticus held out his hand to shake the old woman’s, but she took the opportunity to flip his over.
“My Lord, what luck!” she exclaimed. “Your luck line goes right from one side to the other. Your love line is another matter,” she added and then, pointing to a seat, “sit down.”
They both silently obeyed the order, like a pair of infantry soldiers.
Atticus had brought one of his last tea bags with him. He took it out of his pocket and showed it to the old woman.
“I would like to buy a large quantity of this tea,” he said.
“Give that here,” she replied.
She ripped the sachet open, let the contents fall into the palm of her hand, tried it with the tip of her tongue, and said, “Twinings Earl Grey.”
“Remarkable!” exclaimed Atticus.
“It says so on the label, míster,” the old woman pointed out. “I’ll go and see if I’ve got any in the store.”
Señá Candela got up and left the living room, leaving behind her a strange smell, like that of a wheat field at dawn.
“Is she a witch?” asked Atticus in a hushed tone.
“She’s more like an old-fashioned psychiatrist, the kind who doesn’t have a certificate on the wall but cures people all the same,” replied Soleá, amused. “She’s an old friend of my granny’s, godmother to my uncle Manolo, the one who owns Manolo’s Bar. She knew we were coming because my granny phoned her.”
Atticus looked around. The living room was welcoming, shady and cool. The only furniture was the small round table they were sitting at, an old spice cabinet with lots of drawers, and three or four framed photos from Easter celebrations featuring la Virgen de la Macarena and el Cristo de la Legión. On the table stood a kettle, several cups, a set of scales, and a locked metal box where Señá Candela kept the money.
Atticus and Soleá remained in silence until the old woman came back, carrying a heavy packet.
“You’re in luck,” she told Atticus. “I’ve got two kilos.”
That packet could have contained tea or animal feed; there was nothing to guarantee where it had come from or the state it was in.
“Try some,” she said, dropping a pinch into the strainer she had placed on top of one of the cups and pouring hot water over it. “You too, girl,” she added, pouring a cup for Soleá as well.
Her expectant look meant they couldn’t refuse the offer. They both drank the black tea with a certain amount of apprehension and then, to Soleá’s surprise, Atticus shouted, “It’s perfect! Bona fide Twinings Earl Grey!”
And at once he placed a hundred-euro note on the table in payment for
such a delicacy. Then he took Soleá by the hand—she felt his rough skin on her fingers—bade goodbye to Señá Candela and, with the packet under his arm, went out into the street, where Agustín was waiting for them to leave so he could shut the door and call it quits for the day.
“How far are we from the sea?” asked Atticus when he was back behind the wheel of the truck.
“About an hour’s drive, Míster Crasman,” Soleá replied.
“Then we can still get there in time to see the sunset,” said Atticus with a smile.
CHAPTER 39
The beach was no more than a little crescent-shaped patch of sand sandwiched between a reef and an old ruined fort. They sat as if at the theater. Their screen was the horizon, the scene was the sun disappearing in the distance: an orange spot sinking into the black ocean. The only audience was Soleá, covered in goose bumps, and Atticus at her side, barefoot, his trousers rolled up to his shins, white skin, open shirt, closed eyes.
He moved his hand toward Soleá’s arm—what could there have been in Señá Candela’s tea?—and then upward, slowly stroking her skin with his pale fingers, up to her shoulder, up to her neck, up to her hairline on the dark side of the moon. He wound his fingers in her hair, drew spirals in the air.
When Soleá felt Atticus’s hand creeping up her, she was tempted to stop him. But when she saw that his eyes were closed, she suddenly felt sorry for him and let him carry on in silence, blindly—if only to see what happened, where his hand would go next. Down her back, to her waist, then over her hip to the hollow of her belly button. Then his hand opened and came to rest warmly on her stomach.
Then came his mouth—what could there have been in Candela’s tea? She felt him bite her lips. His tongue tasted hers, and Soleá opened up completely—what could there have been in Candela’s tea?—just as a watermelon splits open when hit, incapable of concealing its red, juicy, sweet fruit inside that hard, dull shell any longer.
Atticus was very experienced. Soleá was not. She hadn’t yet understood what her hair was for, or why her breasts were the shape of cupped hands, or how her mysteries fitted into the paths that he was moving along. Now you have to throw your head back and I kiss your neck, now to one side and I bite you gently on the earlobe, and now you let me help you lie back on the sand, that’s it, slowly, so you don’t break into a thousand pieces and disappear into the ground beneath us.
Atticus drew his lips away from Soleá’s mouth to confess that he had wanted her since the very moment he fell under the spell of her blue eyes, that when he was at her side the heat suffocated him, that he couldn’t look at her without his soul aching, and that she was so evasive, flighty, and mysterious that he didn’t have a clue what she felt. He got the impression that Soleá felt something for him too, but even so, she was trying to avoid him, as if she was scared of him. What am I to you, Soleá? A heartless fiend ready to throw you and your friends out on the street in order to save my father’s business some money? Is that how you see me, Soleá? Or is it just that you don’t like me, you don’t like my clumsy hands, my awful accent, the way I am with you, laying everything bare? Because if there’s something about me you don’t like, Soleá, whatever it is, I can change it. I’ll learn to play the guitar, I’ll eat ham and pretend it’s delicious, I’ll share my secrets with your whole family, I’ll live in a cave if that’s what you want, or get drunk on wine with fizzy pop, or watch a bullfight without looking disgusted (it’ll be fine, I’ll just think of something else), I’ll grow old in Granada, sit on a bench, watch the cars go by, anything, so long as you, Soleá, want to be by my side and have a cup of tea with me.
She sat up. She lifted a hand to her mouth. She wiped her red lips. She looked at him. Her blue eyes had become as black as olives, Candela’s herbal tea was sloshing around her belly and Atticus’s hand was still resting on her stomach.
“Look, Míster Crasman,” she said. “Why should I lie to you anymore? I tricked you into coming here, with that story about García Lorca’s poems, so you wouldn’t close the magazine. That’s all.
“I call Berta every night, I tell her what’s happened during the day, I tell her you haven’t asked about the poems, in fact you seem to have forgotten about them, and Berta breathes a sigh of relief, and she tells the others that, at least for now, they can carry on with their lives. She says, ‘Thank you, Soleá, for the sacrifice you, your mother, and your grandmother are making,’ and I reply that it’s not such a big deal, you’re a good man and I feel bad for lying to you. But you see, Míster Crasman, I’m twenty-five years old, I’ve got my life ahead of me, and I can find another job or move back home, but Berta and Asunción, the poor things, what are they going to do at their age? Or María, with three kids and a useless husband? Or Gaby, who’s married to the kind of painter who never sells a painting, however much she tries to convince herself otherwise? The four of them barely scrape by with what they earn at the magazine.
“It was my idea. It’s not that the poems don’t exist, they do. But it wasn’t García Lorca who wrote them, Míster Crasman, it was Granny Remedios, an uneducated woman. And she keeps them in the attic with her sewing machine and old bits of junk, because they’re worthless, they’re scribbles, that’s all. You can go now. I’ve told you the secret, you can close the magazine quite happily and go back to England and forget about me and all of this. I’m so sorry that you got your hopes up about me; you don’t deserve to have it broken to you like this. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Míster Crasman, that’s the absolute truth. The only truth among all these lies.”
Then she got up, shook the sand from her dress, and slowly walked the short distance to Arcángel’s truck, started it up, and vanished.
Atticus was frozen still. Cold ran down his spine. Bare feet, open shirt, and a broken heart.
Darkness fell on him and he didn’t want to push it away. The only sensible thing he did that sleepless night was to take his cell phone, his last link to the rest of humanity, out of the back pocket of his trousers and hurl it into the waves with all his rower’s strength, to be lost in the depths of the sea.
CHAPTER 40
December 15 was a cold, cloudy Friday, the kind of day you wish was a Saturday so you could spend all morning in bed. Asunción arrived at the office at nine o’clock sharp, carrying a flask of hot chocolate and two paper cones of churros. She hung her coat on the hook behind the door and sat down to wait for Gaby to arrive and join her in getting drunk on sugar and grease, her drugs of choice at such an early hour, on such a grim day, and with such a painful, empty stomach.
She thought Gaby would probably be a while yet. She and Livingstone had made up the day before and, according to what Gaby had said over the phone, they were going to take things easy from now on. She no longer had the same urgency to become a mother, thanks to Franklin’s cuddles and his confession that he had never really wanted to go back to Argentina, he only said so because they were having such trouble conceiving a baby. He had sobbed as he admitted this, and Gaby thought she had never seen a more helpless child than her husband. Now nothing could upset her. Not even the problems at Librarte or the unremitting arrival of her period every twenty-eight days. She said she felt as calm as can be and couldn’t stop grinning like a Cheshire cat.
A couple of hours earlier, when it was still dark, the phone had rung on Asunción’s bedside table, waking her up and giving her the fright of her life, followed by terrible news, which caused her to burst into a flood of tears. Berta had brought her up to speed with the tale of César Barbosa’s serial abuses, in which María had turned out to be the unwilling accomplice and the rest of them the innocent victims. The inevitable result was the demise of the magazine. Now, while she waited for Gaby to say goodbye to Franklin at the door, Asunción tried to find the words to break the bad news to her in the nicest way possible.
She didn’t have time to rehearse her speech. Gaby arrived at nine thirty, humming, bounding up the stairs two by two; she unbuttoned her red coat before star
ting to search the labyrinthine depths of her bag for her office keys, took off her orange scarf, her blue hat, her green gloves. She shed her colorful woolen skin. She opened the door and was shocked to find Asunción waiting for her with breakfast laid out on the photocopier, calculated that there were more than a dozen churros each, and understood that something bad was up.
“Come on, Gaby, have some of these, come into the warmth, have a seat here,” said Asunción, pointing to the rocking chair that she had dragged in from Berta’s office, which now took up most of the free space between the desks and the bookshelf.
“This can’t be to celebrate me and Franklin making up. Something’s happened, right?”
“Yes, love, it has. Something awful.” Asunción couldn’t stop the tears welling up in her eyes again. She downed her hot chocolate and left the empty cup on her mouse pad.
Gaby did as she was told. She sat down and clung for dear life to the arms of the rocking chair, as if it were a raft in the middle of the ocean.
“Do you remember César Barbosa?”
“The Pirate.”
“The very same. Well, it turns out that he and María have been seeing each other for about a year now.”
“Bloody hell, so María’s lover is Barbosa!”
“Look, Gaby, I couldn’t name a bigger son of a bitch than Barbosa if you paid me. It turns out that last January, by mistake, he got paid twice for an invoice and María called him to ask for the money back. So he, the crafty thing, realized that María was the only one who’d noticed the double payment. He invited her out to dinner a couple of times, seduced her—you know, with that stubble, the tattoo, the motorbike, and the bad-guy look—and bit by bit he got her to tell him how the Librarte accounts worked. María explained that Berta signed the invoices and gave them to her, she made a copy for our records and sent the original to England, so they could pay out from the central office. I don’t know if you knew that that’s the way it’s always been: Librarte only has a tiny amount in the bank and everything else, our wages and all that, is paid for from London.”
The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman Page 15