The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  Eduardo asked her in. Olga looked shiftily around the apartment, the records strewn across the table. She accepted the coffee Eduardo offered her but didn’t touch it; instead she spent the whole time smoking and tapping her ash onto the saucer. At first she had trouble speaking, and took her time getting around to it, instead mentioning that she’d seen some of Eduardo’s canvases in a gallery that she neglected to name. Disturbing but deep, those were her words. Perhaps what she should have said was that they were deep because they were disturbing. She also asked him why his portrait subjects were anonymous. Because that’s what they were, anonymous, he replied. No one knows their names. Names are excuses, inventions we use to hide behind. She said she understood. Eduardo didn’t believe her. She was too young, and besides, she wasn’t there to talk about his paintings. She also said she was studying art history and that she was planning to go into the art business, into selling paintings. He didn’t believe that, either.

  She sighed, taking her time: sometimes she liked to go down to the stream to swim. In the summer it was a pleasant place to be, far from the eyes of nosy neighbours. ‘In small towns,’ she explained, ‘people frown on the idea of women swimming in the nude.’ She was obviously one of ‘the women’ in that comment, and it made Eduardo uncomfortable, and struck him as unnecessary. He was about to say as much, but she spoke first, returning to what had brought her to his door to begin with. And all the while Charlie Parker floated through the apartment, though neither of them paid any attention.

  Olga told him that, a few minutes before the accident, she saw a dark-coloured SUV go by. It stuck with her because it was driving too fast, as if the driver either knew the road to the stream well, or was crazy. But she didn’t really think about it until two minutes later, when she heard a tremendous crash. There was a really sharp curve there and if you didn’t know about it, it would be easy to drive off the road.

  When she got to the stream she saw Eduardo’s car, overturned, the wheels spinning up in the air and, a few metres away, a girl’s body. She looked, then, at the SUV, stopped atop the embankment with the driver’s door open. The driver rushed down the slope to the girl’s side and leaned over her. He shouted something, running around her body in circles a few times as if he didn’t know what to do. And that was when Olga realised what was about to happen. She could tell it because suddenly the man stopped holding his head and moaning. He stood very still, looking toward the overturned car, and then looked around, making sure nobody had seen him. After climbing back up the embankment he picked something up — she couldn’t see what but she imagined it was car parts or bits of broken glass — and sped off.

  ‘I was the one who called the ambulance.’

  In addition to that, she’d done something else, too, she explained, taking out a wrinkled sheet of paper that had been ripped out of a spiral notebook: she’d written down the SUV’s licence plate.

  Eduardo paled. He didn’t know what time it was but suddenly the temperature dropped. He looked down at the paper as though it contained a secret formula, and then asked her why she’d decided to come to tell him something like that four months after the fact. Olga responded that at first she thought it best not to get mixed up in the whole thing. She didn’t like cops and had no intention of testifying in court or doing any of the things she imagined were required of a witness.

  ‘I told the police I didn’t see anything, but I can’t keep hiding what I know. Whatever you decide to do about it, that’s up to you. I’ve cleared my conscience, but if you tell the cops I told you, I’ll deny it. I don’t want any trouble.’

  And just like that, a life changes. Suddenly someone appears out of nowhere and rips it apart. And nothing can ever be the same as it was a minute prior. When Olga entered his life, Eduardo was like a meteorite speeding toward the void — and when he collided with her, his course altered and he began heading toward a different sort of abyss. Her revelation didn’t solve anything. All it did was push him a little further into the darkness, toward a deeper, blacker state.

  Perhaps he himself should have gone to the police the moment she left. Maybe that would have changed something; maybe it would have changed everything. But he didn’t.

  ‘Sometimes I feel bad for having told you,’ Olga said, staring at the sidewalk of Calle Atocha.

  They’d taken a leisurely stroll and were now standing in front of the Centro Ruso, the Russian centre of science and culture. A thuggish-looking guy was leaning against its metal gate, hands in his grey overcoat, watching the passers-by. He didn’t exactly look like a museum guide.

  ‘You were only trying to help me,’ Eduardo consoled her. That had happened thirteen years ago; it was absurd to try to rationalise it now, to seek solace. And yet there Olga was, determined to justify herself.

  ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions … Would you at least seriously consider forgetting about the damned portrait? I can get you a better gig, I’m sure.’

  They went to say goodbye and Eduardo offered his cheek, but Olga instead kissed him full on the lips. She didn’t know why, it was just an impulse. It wasn’t a real kiss, but on feeling the contact of her lips, Eduardo’s lips went as hard as the mouth of a cave.

  That night, lying in bed in the dark, Olga felt ridiculous. Conjuring the image of herself swooping in to give Eduardo a kiss was so embarrassing that she cringed, and recalling what she’d said to him irked her. She’d told Eduardo too much. Luckily, it was clear that he had no idea the number of different lives Olga had lived, all accumulated inside herself. He was too blind, too navel-gazing and focused on his own pain to notice anything around him. Maybe it was better that way, she said to herself, stroking the scar on her inner thigh beneath her pyjamas. The reminder of an old tattoo, one that it had cost her dearly to get rid of.

  That scar was the path that once led her to a cobblestone street at midnight. The address scribbled on a scrap of paper turned out to be a basement. The place was sordid, dark, tense. She was a scrawny girl, accustomed to bearing the heavy load of her life without so much as a sigh, but she was only sixteen, and she was terrified.

  The woman who took her coat seemed high, smiling with a mouth that drooped grotesquely, as though her makeup had melted down her face.

  ‘Fun nights, but sad mornings, eh?’ She led her to a small room. In the centre was a cot on wheels, and a gooseneck lamp that cast a harsh, intense light. On a cart with Formica shelves was a selection of surgical tools, all lined up. The woman tried to comfort her, stroking her shoulder, but the touch of her hand only increased Olga’s trembling. The woman told her to take off her dress and panties. It was all going to be quick and painless. She promised.

  ‘OK, young lady, let’s get that out of you, and then you can go back to your life as though nothing happened.’ But the whole procedure was horrific, long, solemn and very painful. There were complications from the start — she said she was only going to aspirate; Olga was only three months’ along, after all. But the woman tore her insides up. She could have died there, and sometimes Olga thought maybe it would have been better if she had. She refused to look at the thing the woman showed her before tossing it into the bin.

  ‘You’re going to be fine. But you need to get to a hospital — a real one.’

  She didn’t. She left, feeling with each step as though she was dying. She had trouble keeping her balance and only managed to get back by leaning on the alley wall for support.

  She couldn’t say a word at home. Her mother would never have believed that one of her boyfriends had seduced her daughter and gotten her pregnant. That couldn’t happen to her.

  Olga’s father had died when she was three. A civil servant who worked in the prisons, he spent his weekends worrying about the lottery — perhaps fretting about money, which they never seemed to have enough of — and about his sudden headaches, which the social services doctor could not explain and which altered his moods, making hi
m more and more bitter. He didn’t make Olga’s mother miserable — but nor did he make her happy. He was simply a shadow, slipping through her fingers without leaving any physical trace.

  From the time she was a little girl, Olga learned to make do with an outward appearance of normalcy, with the life everyone else truly had and her family could not renounce. But in private her father was withdrawn, living in his own secluded little corner, emerging only from time to time in pyjamas and robe, dragging his slippers, a glass of water in one hand, sitting down to watch the news and falling asleep within ten minutes. And her mother watched from a distance, a look of repulsion on her face. She could hardly remember hearing any stories about what her father had been like, what they used to do, or how her parents had met, and her mother had never said a single word that shed light on what her own feelings for the man might have been.

  Her mother never spoke about her feelings in public; the only chinks in her armour that allowed a glimpse into her inner life came out when she was drunk or — after her father died — when she brought home a new boyfriend. Her mother was pretty, far prettier than the men she brought home deserved. But it was so easy to fall into despondency, as though hers were a life not intended to prosper, as though the effort that growing older required was one that responded not to a concrete objective but to mere coincidence and the submission of its protagonist. Some people are like that. They find no purpose in life, they don’t ask anything of anyone, except to keep eking out their petty existence with no major upsets.

  The last boyfriend was a guy whose train had left the station. He was about fifty — perhaps younger but that was how old he looked. He’d turn up at her mother’s door in a wrinkled twill suit, his shirts sometimes missing a button at his stomach, as though the fabric couldn’t take the onslaught of his belly. He had long curly sideburns and a little Hitler moustache that covered his top lip, which drooped down on the right as though he were paralysed. In his right hand he held a box of Lola cigarettes, with a lit one between his yellow-stained, ragged-nailed index and middle fingers. His clothes were messy and his black boots caked with mud. In the beginning, he looked at Olga indifferently, like an inevitable presence not worth bothering to contemplate. He seldom smiled and when he did, it seemed like someone was trying to force him but he couldn’t quite manage it.

  But, in time, his look evolved, without her mother noticing.

  Though she couldn’t recall the month, she knew it was a Wednesday. Wednesday was the day the supermarket delivered their weekly groceries. Olga remembered the shiny handlebars of the bicycle leaning against the door, its worn brown seat, and the boy unloading wicker baskets filled to the brim. Her mother’s boyfriend was sitting across from her, staring at her intently. The room was in semi-darkness and the cool air contrasted with the suffocating, maddening, white heat coming in from outside. Slowly, he stood and approached Olga; he pulled her to his mouth by the neck, firmly but not violently.

  That was the first time, but then came others, many others. Strictly speaking, you couldn’t say he forced her, not violently at least. The truth was, Olga allowed herself to be taken, as if in a narcotic dream in which nothing mattered because she had no free will, no power to change anything or stop anything, as if with each kiss the man were injecting her with poison from his tongue, paralysing her.

  And without realising it, she fell in love. A married man, thirty years older, who was also her mother’s lover. She was so stupid that she actually got his name tattooed on her inner thigh, and she would have done far more than tattoo a pathetic symbol on her skin for that man. For months, she shared him with her mother without her mother suspecting. She found excuses to phone him, even though it wasn’t always him who answered; sometimes it was his wife or a little boy. She put up with humiliations, came running like a little dog in heat to any fleapit he wanted to meet her at for a quick fuck, and dug her nails into her own flesh whenever she heard her mother orgasm with him inside her on the other side of the wall.

  And then that hallucinogenic trip abruptly ended. One morning, he’d arranged to meet her at some rundown rooming house, off the road to Villaverde.

  Olga had decided she’d give him the news after making love, as they smoked a cigarette in bed. But she, the man’s real wife, burst into the room — and it was as if with that invasion her whole fantasy world came crashing down in a thousand pieces, like an airplane cabin suddenly losing pressure. They shouted. But no one can shout and actually communicate at the same time — it all just descends into chaos.

  For a few minutes, Olga had truly believed that her youth would win out, that she’d win the fight, he’d stand up to his wife, tell her the same things he’d whispered to her dozens of times between the sheets. But he caved. In fact, he didn’t even put up a fight. He simply left Olga, just like that, flicked her off as though she were a disgusting bug clinging to his marital bliss.

  ‘We’re going to have a baby!’ Olga cried.

  It shouldn’t have come out like that, she was expecting to be met with the same warmth and rhythm that accompanied them at night, hip to hip, so she could say: ‘Leave your wife, leave my mother. We’re a family now,’ as if that baby were a bond that now made them inseparable. But her cry — desperate, animal-like — was the only thing she had left, the only hope she had of holding on to him.

  He looked at her with the horror of a rotten old man. And in that look, in that tenth of a second, Olga realised her tremendous error. She realised that capital-L Love does not exist, that men are selfish and weak. She realised that she would deplore the man whose name was tattooed on her skin as passionately as she’d loved him a minute earlier.

  He left them, her and her mother, just like that, shooed them out of his life the way you do an annoying insect interrupting your siesta, with a wave of the hand. And that was the end of romantic weekends, of uncomfortable but exciting lovemaking in the back of a car, of promises, poems, gifts, and phone calls at midnight; that was the end of tattoos and complicit glances.

  And when her mother, drunk and lost, called out to him at night, sniffling, not understanding why he’d suddenly abandoned her, Olga glared at her and hated the world.

  No, there was no way Eduardo suspected anything like that. He always looked at her with the impatience of a man obliged to explain the obvious. And the obvious was that Olga was frightened.

  She half-closed her eyes and pictured a naked defenceless body, dead, there on the dirty floor of her room. Her adolescence, butchered.

  How absurd, how pathetic a dead, naked human can seem. How useless, how futile that sort of redemption turns out to be.

  9

  According to custom, salat — Muslim ritual prayers — must be performed five times a day, every day. The most important is that of the mid-afternoon, and that was the one Ibrahim performed most devotedly.

  There was a time when he led prayers among the congregation, an act Sunni Islam allowed members well-versed in the Koran, which he was — as was his father, a man beyond all reproach. Now, however, Ibrahim made do with finding a relatively clean surface on which to rest his forehead before an east-facing wall, an imaginary mihrab pointing to Mecca. In his cell there was no imam or religious officiate to motivate him to pray. Allah cannot allow any man to speak to Him directly, which is why prophets and angels exist. But in there, there was neither one nor the other. What he had to say was between him and God. Though God didn’t seem to want to listen.

  He couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t enough to wash his face, hands, armpits and feet to feel purified, nor to kneel on a mat to find paradise. It wasn’t enough to beg forgiveness in order to deserve it, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted it. From the time he was a child he’d been taught to spiritually distance himself from pleasures, taught that his only objective in this life was the annihilation of the self through Allah, that all human beings are born with two souls, the human and the divine, and that life is a struggle, a
road to perfection whereby the human must be extinguished in favour of the divine. But Ibrahim knew, after a life of strife within himself, that his faith was shaky and his behaviour inconsistent. No, God no longer had faith in him. And he no longer had faith in His kindness. Still, he solemnly adopted the position of qiyam, head bowed and hands folded before his chest, bowed, and then knelt, legs behind him and forehead on the ground.

  One of Ibrahim’s favourite suras was number eighteen, which discussed Iblis, the fallen angel, the only one to disobey Allah. As he whispered it, he couldn’t help but think of his own childhood. About what was expected of him. ‘And then we told the angels, “Bow down before Adam.” And they prostrated, except Iblis. He became a jinn, for he disobeyed the order of His Lord.’ How many lords had he himself disobeyed, how many precepts had he infringed? He had not honoured the memory of his parents, had filled his mother’s life with nothing but tears, had not been able to follow the example of his older brother, martyr of martyrs in Algeria. He was a murderer, an arms trafficker, a mercenary. A fake.

  He poked his head down to the empty cot of his cellmate Arthur and reached a hand to the mark left on his headboard by the photo taken on his honeymoon. Ibrahim had no children, no wife, no family to cry for him when he died, no one to intercede on his behalf when Allah decided that his time had come and sent him the Angel of Death. He’d given everything up for a chimera. Suddenly, he’d found he was nearing old age and had no idea how it had happened. He had no inner peace, he never had, but nor was there war — not anymore. Just loss, blood spilled for no reason, regret, voices and faces lost inside him. The dreams he once had, as a boy, had turned into a nightmare.