‘And what does that have to do with Olsen?’
The old man was surprised at the stranger’s blunt question. He felt a twinge of disappointment, although his disappointments were like very small aftershocks — he’d been through so many that he hardly even noticed anymore. It upset him that someone might show more interest in an economic transaction than in the intrinsic value of what he was trying to sell.
‘Among the things discarded by those heirs is a precious Lumière box camera, first displayed at the Paris Expo in 1867. It’s absolutely priceless, but the owners couldn’t tell, and in order to get that I had to buy all this crap as well. Look, honestly, I don’t think that Olsen guy or anyone else who isn’t a professional antique dealer is going to know how to appraise what you’ve got to offer.’
‘Still, I’m going to try to find him. Thank you anyway, though.’
Guzmán held out a hand. The old man scratched his earlobe, visibly anxious.
‘You see, the thing is, I seriously doubt you’ll be able to find him unless you’re some sort of medium. From what I understand he was in trouble with the tax collector and the law, back in his home country, and he ended up killing himself, in a rather tragicomic way, if I may say.’
Guzmán forced himself to look both surprised and disappointed.
‘For a man you couldn’t even remember, you sure have a lot of details on him.’
‘Your Reynaud has refreshed my memory. Listen, Magnus Olsen was a good collector, and he paid whatever price he was quoted, like all eccentric millionaires; but the truth is he was an amateur, and that doesn’t even matter because it’s impossible now for you to make a deal with him. I, on the other hand, would be able to appraise the fair value, tell you what your article is really worth, and give you a firm offer on it.’
Guzmán pretended to think it over, as if he were a bit disconcerted. Of course, the roll of pictures didn’t even exist. So he improvised.
‘You’re right. I’ll bring the roll in, maybe we can come to an agreement. After all, I really do need the money.’
This was more than the old man could have hoped for. The guy’s got a priceless artifact he was willing to sell that fucking Swedish amateur, and he makes a blunder like that — admitting he seriously needs the cash — and now, the perspective of a profitable deal predisposed him in Guzmán’s favour.
‘Come back anytime,’ he said, walking him to the door. ‘Hermits like me end up realising how nice it is to have company when the noise inside our heads no longer fills the loneliness. Old age is comprised of silence, you see. A silence that’s not very pleasant, too much like an empty room. We value all the things life has to offer when they’re almost gone — intelligent company, going for walks, a good shit in the morning, a song we’ve heard a thousand times without ever really listening …’
Guzmán nodded. He already had one foot out the door when something he seemed to have forgotten, soothing minor, made him retrace his steps.
‘Listen, Dámaso, one more thing: do you know a man named Ian Mackenzie? He may have come in with Olsen at some point.’
‘Who is he?’
‘A Welshman, film director. You may have seen one of his movies — though I’m afraid Juanito Valderrama didn’t star in any of them.’ He said all this slowly, staring at the old man. He took pleasure in noting the way the muscles on his old, indifferent face contracted ever so slightly. Bosco had taught him that: make them feel the knife entering their flesh before you’ve even shown it to them, let them imagine the horror you’re on the verge of inflicting, let them fear you before you’ve even lifted a finger.
‘I … I don’t think so. No, I’m sure I don’t,’ he declared with a sudden finality that slipped too quickly from his lips.
Guzmán feigned frustration.
‘Doesn’t matter, I was just curious. You’ve been a great help; I really appreciate it. I’ll be back with those Reynaud pictures.’
As he walked down the street, he didn’t need to look back to know that the old man was watching him from behind the opaque louvers of his shop. Guzmán felt an almost instinctual, animalistic glee, like a hound who picks up the scent of blood — a weak, uncertain trail — and will not let up until it leads him to the pray. No one breaks immediately, that much he knew from experience. But the old man had committed enough blunders to make him suspicious. He had no reason to lie about Olsen and yet he had, only to backpedal pathetically as soon as he thought he might lose out on a lucrative deal — one that would never come off. Guzmán didn’t have — nor had he ever had pictures of anything but his own graduation, from when he became an officer in the Chilean navy. Plus, the man had lied when he said he didn’t know or remember Ian Mackenzie. The dried spittle in the corner of his mouth had given him away. But what excited Guzmán’s bloodhound instinct most was that he’d denied all knowledge of something as apparently harmless as a private film club.
The years had taught him to be patient and to observe. In the cells at La Moneda, he’d often take a stool and place it just outside the door to observe the detainees before he interrogated them. He could spend hours sitting there, cigarette butts piling up at his feet, searching for any sign of weakness, any tiny weakness he could pounce on and exploit later. Others preferred using brute force to break a prisoner’s will — fists, electric shock, beatings, knives, rats — whatever it took. Guzmán wasn’t one of those, he wasn’t a sadist, wasn’t deranged. He kept his goal in sight, and his goal was to penetrate the mind of the detainee, to find out what he or she knew. Violence, of course, was a necessary part of that. Sometimes after a long torture session even death became routine, predictable, desirable, if there was nothing more to be learned from the person being interrogated. But that was always after a long and painstaking plan, an assault on the prisoner’s very soul.
Only idiots and lunatics lied for no reason. And that old man was neither. In other circumstances, simply squeezing his armpits with pliers a few times would have done it — he’d have given up what he knew that easily. But these weren’t the eighties in Chile, and Spain was certainly not the same place he remembered from his days working with Carrero Blanco’s anti-terrorist forces.
There are no coincidences, there are only different ways of making sense of things — a code to be cracked, he thought.
He was thirsty. It was late afternoon in Madrid, and the streets — lively, joyful, boisterous — offered new opportunities on every corner. An opportunity to forget who he was. He wondered what Olsen’s widow was doing right now. Maybe drinking alone.
Guzmán wasn’t sure why that woman reminded him so much of Candela.
The pub had a large, pleasant barroom, with small, grey stone vases, each with a few fresh-cut flowers, decorating every table. The walls had been painted surreal colours and were heavily lacquered. The bar lined one wall, with mirrored glass cabinets behind it, and a buzzer that, when rung, ding-donged like a doorbell. A few metres from the bar sat a group of throwbacks — pseudo-bohemians in faded leather jackets and moccasins, smoking machine-rolled joints that were systematically perfect and uniform in appearance. They discussed art and politics as if the two topics naturally flowed back and forth, while hookers sauntered around, far more tormented than their laughter and primping would seem to indicate. You could sense the overwhelming failure that already inhabited them.
Some of the other customers looked sad and defeated. There were businessmen in cheap suits and ties, their briefcases full of useless samples, and truck drivers with languid eyes who sat quietly, downing their beers — men who washed their faces and heads at rest stops to make themselves minimally presentable. There was a piano in one corner, its top open, keys as yellow as an old man’s teeth. The pianist played with no brio whatsoever, a potpourri of songs that punctuated the gulps he took from a tall glass of gin, which he made sure was never empty. Each time he raised the glass in the air, an attentive waitress came to fi
ll it up again. In a couple of years he’d be dead, his fingers perhaps atrophied from arthritis, unable to play or even clutch a highball glass between his gnarled digits, and unable to beckon the cocktail waitress.
‘Thinking of an old song?’
Seated at a table, Guzmán startled, like a jellyfish floating in the water. An inert body reacting only when something bothered him.
A woman with a drawn-on mole smiled at him, leaning back indolently, staring out at the world through fake eyelashes and wearing a smile prone to both ridicule and pride that did her no favours.
‘Not exactly,’ Guzmán replied, wrenching the words slowly from the depths of his soul.
‘Mind if I sit with you?’ She already had, so Guzmán simply shrugged. People should take more care around carnivorous plants, he thought. They have the brightest colours, and on the surface they seem harmless. The woman must not have been able to tell.
She told him her name, but he immediately forgot it.
‘Here we are, at the “ineluctable limit of the diaphanous”,’ she said.
His tongue thick, Guzmán asked her what that was supposed to mean. She smiled, revealing a mouth full of teeth so crooked that flashing them even momentarily seemed too much.
‘I don’t know. I heard it on the radio when I was driving. I liked it, so I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. That’s what I do with odd words and sentences I find interesting. I write them down so I don’t forget.’ She didn’t say she did it to learn them, or to understand them, or to be able to use them later. No — it was so she wouldn’t forget.
Guzmán smiled, moved by an almost perverse curiosity at the defective behaviour of human beings.
‘Great. Tell me your life story.’
‘There’s not a lot to tell. When I was fourteen a friend of my father’s took my virginity before I’d even had my first kiss, and it’s all been downhill from there,’ she said, giggling. She was drunk. Or pretending to be.
What was he doing when he was fourteen? He was just a kid with short eyelashes and bushy brows, riding the octopus at the local fair. But he couldn’t recall who his first kiss had been.
The woman kept drinking. She’d run up a long list of boyfriends, exes, husbands and lovers by that point — relationships long and short, each with the common denominator of having been complicated.
‘Men don’t know how to give me what I want.’
‘Well, do you know how to ask them for it?’
‘What I need is for men to eat me up with their eyes, to bite my legs and neck and tits in their minds. I want to feel wanted, not admired like some sculpture in the gardens of Venice. I need to be touched by impatient hands, lubricious hands — I read that word in an ad for vaginal cream this morning — to get me wet.’
There’s a place for every freak at this carnival, Guzmán thought. People want to lead different lives, lives they’d conjured up in their minds, but few of them have the courage to actually do it. She didn’t care if he was listening to her or not. She just needed to vent. She’d drunk too much and, in all honesty, didn’t find him attractive in the slightest; still, she would end up asking him to go to bed, just to keep from being alone.
The woman pulled out some coke, tapping it into a line on her compact mirror. Then she cut the little worm in two and they each snorted their little insect eagerly. Once it was inside, closer to sorrow, coke turned into truth. Suddenly she kissed him. This is like drinking cyanide, Guzmán thought, feeling his tongue inside her mouth. He closed his eyes and downed his hemlock.
He let himself be led to the top floor. The room was pretty. It had cathedral ceilings with thick cedar beams. The whitewashed walls weren’t flat but had the bulges of a crumbling building, like the fatty cysts that spring up on old people’s faces. The carpet was red, and gold-leaf mirrors reflected every part of the room’s anatomy.
Guzmán sat down on the bed — wide, morgue-like, covered in a white crochet bedspread with a lifeless, antiseptic-clean smell. The bed was sad, like everything else about poor people trying to emulate wealth. It wasn’t the bed of a princess, it was the bed of a hooker, but it had a nice canopy and mirrors on the ceiling that made it easy to explore the precise geography of a naked body.
‘You okay?’ she asked, washing herself in the bidet.
Guzmán eyed her with profound sorrow. From the old ever springs the new, he thought. He repeated this in silence, trying to make the maxim true, but he couldn’t pull it off. He looked away. She slithered over to the bed and gave him a sideways smile. He could feel, in his fingertips, the beating of his own heart: boom, boom, boom, the steps of a giant trapped in a cage.
‘I can make the screaming in your head stop for awhile.’
‘You got a stake to drive into my heart?’ He could hear someone screaming through the walls, a truck starting up in the parking lot, and the distant laughter of other prostitutes in the hallway, the sounds mingling as if he were at the bottom of a pool. Sometimes he was drawn closer to being certain that life was nothing at all, nothing but a fantasy that would vanish if you just opened your eyes.
‘You want me to suck you off?’ she asked.
Guzmán smiled cruelly.
He sat very quiet, staring into darkness, penetrating it as if trying to see into a dense forest full of mist. He thought of Candela’s voice, the headlights of Bosco’s car illuminating grains of sand floating in the air, the sound of the blowtorch being lit, the spittle on the lips of the thugs, laughing as they held him down. Then he closed his eyes and felt another type of darkness — deeper, with no tones. He watched the woman undo his zipper and stroke him through his pants. Guzmán squeezed his eyelids shut, recreating the Basque music teacher’s fingers, the touch of her warm fingertips on his glistening foreskin, the taste of her tongue slowly licking him from the base of his testicles up, tracing the length of his erect member.
The woman had gone quiet. She was staring at his singed skin as though she’d accidentally opened the door to hell. His lacerated penis and scorched, empty scrotum were a truth too intense and horrific to face.
‘What? You don’t want to suck me off? Use your imagination. It used to be there,’ Guzmán said with a sorrowful laugh.
People think they know what true horror really is, they feel cursed. But they always end up looking away when faced with a greater horror than their own, he thought. That’s how fragile the human condition is.
Guzmán stood and suddenly felt too drunk and high to keep his balance; he tripped and took down the lamp on the nightstand, breaking the shade and cutting his hand. He dragged himself to the bathroom, trailing drops of blood that exploded as they landed, like little red bombs hitting the floor in slow motion.
Above the toilet bowl was a paper valance decorated with a little blue-and-yellow winged bird; its brown eyes gazed out in profound silence. Guzmán traced the bird’s outline with one finger. He pulled up his pants and washed his hands, contemplating the tiny rivers of blood washing down the drain with the water.
When he walked out of the room he saw the woman sitting there on the bed.
He closed the door quietly, leaving her to cry in peace.
11
Mr Who took a small step back and glanced down toward the basement. He didn’t like being there: it was like walking through the narrow, claustrophobic passageway of a submarine, and enclosed spaces made him uneasy. The room was occupied by a long table filled with endless scraps of cloth. Two dozen women, some very young — almost girls — all of them Asian, sat along either side, working in silence beneath the enormous fluorescent lights that hung on chains from the waste pipes and plumbing of the restaurant above their heads. In some places the pipes leaked, rank water puddling on the table. The stench was pervasive, a mix of human sweat, kitchen grease and industrial oil.
At the end of the hall was a screen made of thick plastic panels through which the silhouette
s on the other side could just be made out. Judging by the hum of machines, it was an illegal sweatshop. Mr Who fought the desire to go through that door. He knew Mei was in there, somewhere in that labyrinthine hell. He’d heard terrible things about what went on in those places, the working conditions, but he couldn’t think about that — contemplating what Mei might be going through made him weak, and she needed him to be strong enough for the both of them. Otherwise he’d never be able to get her out of there.
On the stairs, Chang was saying goodbye to a customer, shaking hands. When Who was a kid and Chang saw him on the street, he’d bring him to the back of the restaurant and invite him to drink tea and smoke, something Maribel and Teo would never have let him do. Chang knew how to make him feel important, older. ‘You’re one of mine,’ he’d say, stroking his head. And to Who, that seemed like the greatest praise he could possibly receive. Chang was garrulous and told him things about his past in Dalian, an important coastal town in China. He fantasised about moving back one day and setting up a real emporium.
Chang was the first one to see the potential of Who’s androgynous physique, the bonus it might bring to his business. He was the first to offer him money in exchange for sex. Mr Who, at the time, was fifteen.
That first time, right after Chang ejaculated into his mouth, Mr Who ran to the bathroom trying not to gag, and vomited. The old man looked on coldly, displaying no emotion — not even anger or amusement. When he’d emptied his stomach, he made Who rinse his mouth and then ordered him to start all over again.
The Heart Tastes Bitter Page 22