The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  One night Arthur had come home terribly upset. Andrea had been waiting up for him because she had something important to tell him, but he didn’t even see her when he walked in. His clothes were wet and his shoes splattered with mud. He went straight to the garage and returned a few minutes later with an industrial-sized garbage bag in one hand. When he saw Andrea there in the living room, he startled.

  ‘How long have you been standing there spying on me?’ he asked, furious.

  Andrea stared at him, infuriated. Spying? Had he lost his mind? She’d been up all night waiting for him to come home — happy at first, then sad, and then livid, as the hours ticked by. And now he was making her feel like a stranger in her own home.

  ‘We have to talk,’ she said, her eyes going to the bin bag Arthur held. He held the car keys in his other hand. ‘Are you planning to go back out?’

  ‘Now is not the time, Andrea,’ he replied. He’d been drinking, she thought, and maybe even taken drugs. His pupils were dilated and he kept licking his lips. He smelled like a brothel.

  The smell offended Andrea deeply, as did the uncomprehending look he gave her when she said, ‘Aroha’s had a bad night. The colic kept her awake. We have to take her to the hospital.’

  ‘And you expect me to do that? She’s four months old, for God’s sake, it’s normal.’

  Something happened then, a confrontation between the person each of them had become at that very instant. Chaos exploded in the most unlikely of ways. Andrea began shouting, insulting him senselessly, years of accumulated resentment and reproach streaming from her mouth like a torrent — everything from ridiculous offenses to deep emotional scars, pouring out with vitriol.

  ‘I can’t stand it anymore. I’ll take Aroha. We’re leaving.’

  Arthur glared at her, full of hatred — for himself, for her, for everything. A hatred she’d never before seen. Aroha’s crying could be heard coming from the bedroom upstairs.

  ‘Do whatever the hell you want,’ he shouted. And then he left, slamming the door, and Andrea stood there in the middle of the living room, staring at the broken glass from a vase he’d hurled on his way out.

  Arthur returned early in the morning. Andrea heard him come into the bedroom, take off his clothes and put them on a hanger, sit down beside her on the bed and sigh. He was gazing at her, taking in her expression, but she pretended to be asleep. She let him pull her close, so close that their bodies merged, let him cry on her shoulder, let his tears slide down onto her arms and her nightgown. She listened to him beg forgiveness, explain what a terrible day he’d had, promise that he’d change, swear he’d become the same man he’d once been.

  She listened to him, and she accepted his words. But deep down, on that night fourteen years earlier, Andrea stopped loving Arthur.

  The reception was in full swing. Waiters glided from group to group, balancing trays of ham, salmon and cheese canapés. They were like tightrope walkers, skilfully dipping and sailing between the guests. The hotel had installed two bars out on the terrace, one by the pool and the other close to the balcony overlooking Madrid’s old quarter. The Secretary of State for Culture was giving a speech from a podium that had been set up in the centre of the terrace. No one was paying any attention to him, but he didn’t seem to care. He smiled for the cameras like a mediocre, B-list actor.

  Arthur glanced up. Eduardo had appeared to his right. He looked awful.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Eduardo gave the drunken giggle of a man who knows how to hold his liquor. He downed a glass of wine in one gulp, to the horror of those watching — it was, after all, 300-euro-a-bottle wine. Immediately, he accosted a waiter to grab another.

  ‘I saw Ibrahim in the hotel lobby. I told him I had something urgent to discuss with you and he walked me to the elevators. His scar is like a VIP pass. The hostess couldn’t bear to deny me entry.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here. Especially not in the state you’re in.’

  Eduardo glanced around with a bemused expression.

  ‘Why not? I’m the king’s official portrait artist. And this is your court, is it not? Judges, politicians, entrepreneurs, writers, actors, lawyers … Bet they all owe you something, some kind of favour. Maybe they’re afraid of you. I bet some of them even despise you. You’re not one of them, and yet you own them. They belong to you. Don’t you have the right to exhibit your serfs, your lackeys, the assortment of jesters who entertain you?’

  Eduardo’s voice was becoming loud enough to attract the attention of those nearby, without his intending it to. Arthur shot him a furious glance, discreetly took hold of his elbow and led him off to a corner.

  Red roof tiles shimmered in the dappled late-afternoon sunlight of the Austrias quarter, making it look as if it had just rained. Above the balcony, fairy lights hung twinkling from invisible strings, like at a tacky open-air dance. The bells from the Convent of the Order of St Clare were ringing in the distance. If you closed your eyes, it could have been any small town in La Mancha. The speeches were over and Schubert was playing over the loudspeakers. The contrast was almost comical.

  ‘Have you lost your mind? Why are you making a scene?’

  With a transformative skill normally seen only in mimes, Eduardo’s face suddenly morphed, no longer that of a mouthy drunk. He leaned in close to Arthur to examine his face, like a short-sighted man who’s misplaced his glasses. Eduardo had spent so long trying to read that expression that he knew it as well as his own. And yet he now saw what Gloria meant when she rejected those first initial sketches he’d given her in Barcelona — he hadn’t captured the most essential thing, hadn’t captured Arthur’s true nature.

  ‘If I were to paint you again now, you’d look completely different.’

  Arthur held his gaze, unperturbed, aware of the dozens of guests who, albeit surreptitiously, were paying close attention. But beneath his artfully unflustered face there was latent rage, and scorn oozed from the corners of his mouth.

  ‘What do you want? You’ve got your portrait. Go ahead, give it to Gloria, tell her what kind of monster I am, feed her all the lines she wants to hear.’

  Eduardo grabbed another glass of wine and gulped it down.

  Arthur was a fraud, just like Gloria, just like Olga, like Eduardo himself — so caught up in his own memories that he couldn’t tell truth from fiction. Their lives were completely artificial. They obsessed over superficialities in order to cover up their emptiness. He saw women wearing expensive jewels to try to camouflage their mediocrity, though it was still blatantly obvious the moment they jammed a pinky into their mouths to free a bit of trapped food. He saw a senior official smile for the cameras, and then the second he was out of the spotlight grope the waitress’ breast while she stood there, resigned. He saw the guests’ phony laughter not echoed in their eyes, as they searched for someone more important to grovel to. It was all a lie full of holes nobody wanted to see. Because they were the holes. All of them.

  ‘I just found out that I killed an innocent man, fourteen years after the fact. I killed the wrong man.’ The words weighed him down like stones, but he felt the need to vomit them forth. ‘I’m a fucking bastard, a bad joke.’

  The man inhabiting Arthur’s body took his leave at precisely that moment. He left, went far away, to a place were Eduardo’s eyes couldn’t trap him.

  ‘Nobody is innocent, Eduardo. I would have thought you’d have realised that by now.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Eduardo slurred. ‘Nobody’s innocent. Which leads me to a terrible conclusion — whoever killed my family is still out there, mocking me.’

  Arthur sliced clean through him like a knife.

  ‘What does that matter now? Would you kill again? Take revenge? We’ve all done plenty of stupid things in our lives.’

  Eduardo looked away. Arthur was probably right.

  ‘If only I could be sure that his l
ife didn’t turn out better than mine …’

  Arthur looked at him with pity. All Eduardo’s expression told him was that it made no sense to find things out, if you can’t do anything about them.

  The little hotel on the outskirts of town was no longer there. The entire landscape had changed dramatically, and the change in terrain was echoed in more profound, more personal changes, too. Arthur hadn’t been back in fourteen years, and as he got out of the car, he was hit by the inevitable transformation that awaits us all in the last stage of life.

  It was hard even to make out the ruins of the building, which was now overrun by scrub so tall it covered the old stone wall that once surrounded the property. Part of the gabled roof had collapsed — it looked as if a bomb had fallen on it, and the beautiful Arabic tiles had lost their lacquered sheen and were now covered in scum. Most of the windows were bricked over and the walls had become a mural of graffiti. In one corner a rusty sign proclaimed the property was for sale, although the real estate agent’s phone number was so faded it was nearly illegible. The highway had been rerouted behind the hotel, so the aggravating roar of heavy trucks was constant, and they’d put in a gas station with a minimart.

  That place had once been their paradise, a respite from their daily lives, a place they came every weekend, for years. There were rustic curtains — very discreet — and fresh-cut flowers on the shelves; a huge Toledan bed with dark wood headboard; baskets of fresh fruit; and an adorable dining room with a half-dozen or so other couples — often the same ones, cuddling secretively, complicit — greeting one another wordlessly, wearing expressions of suppressed joy, taking part in the same half-guilty, half-effervescent clandestine adventure.

  ‘I bet there’s no place like this in Chicago,’ he’d say to Diana, boldly taking her hand, hidden behind topiary bushes pruned into bizarre animal and plant shapes, enjoying the silence broken only by birds whose nests were so high in the trees that they were hard to identify. And Diana, dressed casually in jeans and a tank top, tennis shoes in place of high heels, no jewellery, let herself be swept away by that fairy tale. She smiled at him, wrapped her arms around him fearlessly, rested her head on his chest and kissed his neck, leaving a moist, warm trail across his skin.

  They went every weekend — 48 hours of stolen time that Arthur managed by weaving a tangled web of excuses for Andrea. He’d become an expert liar, very convincing. Or so he thought. And the few hours he spent with Diana were just enough to be able to pretend that what they had was special and different, untainted by the vulgarity of everyday existence.

  But the time lovers struggle to procure for one another ends up making them greedy. The perfect fiction stops being enough. And there comes a time when stolen time no longer suffices. One of the two always wants to give up their slice of heaven, to take a bite of the forbidden apple with the promise of something more real, albeit imperfect. In their case, it was Diana who wanted more — more time, more days, more intensity. She wanted the legitimacy of the light of day, wanted to experience the everyday travails of an average couple, the exhaustion of cohabitation, of the compromises couples make, which are in fact a struggle in which each tries to impose their desires on the other. She wanted to savour the slow defeat of permanent coupledom personally. Arthur’s mawkish fairy tale was no longer enough.

  ‘I want to be with you when you’re sick, and weak, and insecure. I want to see you absent, angry, distracted; I want to see your selfishness and your childish whims; I want to see you cry. I want to be there, by your side. I’m tired of loving a fairytale. I want to love the real you, flesh and blood.’

  That was what led to the argument they’d had the last night they spent in that hotel. Fourteen years ago. The fateful night had actually begun earlier in the evening, beneath the spikey fronds of a palm tree, when Diana began complaining — in Spanish — that she was just a fulana, a tart. Normally they spoke in English, removing themselves even further from real life. The heat that day was as thick as hot chocolate, though without the humidity of the coast. They were surrounded by dry pebbles, desiccated creek beds, the parched earth of what was once a pond baked and cracked. Bluebottles buzzed nearby, attempting to sip at flowerpots.

  It was Arthur’s fault. He should never have given in to the snake-charm of intimacy, to his own deceit. They had made love pressed up against the wooden doors of an armoire, imprinting their own sweaty skin with the designs carved into the wood. Then they’d lain down, still naked, on the cold ceramic tile floor.

  It was the delusion of believing you inhabit the real world that led him to commit a serious blunder — when Diana asked him what he was thinking about, he told her. What he should have said was something like, I’m thinking of you, of how perfect this is, I’m in heaven. Something Diana’s ears were prepared to hear, something that didn’t go off-script. But he didn’t. He told her something far worse. The truth.

  ‘I was thinking about a little inn on Rue Al-Mansur in Algiers, by the port. It had a fan like this one, though the air there was different — salty, almost wet, it got under your skin and left you smelling like algae, and oil, and the docks. The light was different, too, it streamed across the furniture like the gentle hand of a giant caressing its possessions. From the window you could hear the sound of the waves, truck horns on the loading dock, stevedores shouting, children laughing — Algerian kids’ laughter is unlike any music in the world, you should hear it. I was thinking that my heart used to pound in that bedroom, too, because I was younger, more impetuous, more naive. I was thinking about Andrea, lying beside me, against me, the two of us all steamy and stuck together like half-eaten candies that are starting to melt. I was thinking about the road that led me from that bedroom to this one.’

  He was also thinking about ending the affair he was having with Diana, with all the Dianas in his life, about putting a stop to his weekend escapes and going home, and holding Andrea.

  He was thinking that on the way home he’d stop off somewhere to buy her flowers. And a little something for Aroha, too. Maybe one of those little nightlights with bears on them.

  The baby had come between them like a wall being erected slowly, brick by brick. He’d first sensed it when he saw her in the delivery room, as the doctor tied the umbilical cord. Astonishingly, Arthur had trembled in a way that more resembled fear than awe. He’d wondered what that tiny bundle of flesh was, shrieking as if the whole world were hers for the asking, and she was asking for it. What kind of thing — that was the only word that came to him — fitted in a pair of gloved hands, hands that scooped it up like water from a bowl. She’s all yours, the doctor had said, handing her over like an offering, like a gift. And that power scared him.

  He couldn’t help but think of his father in his dress uniform, a decorated lieutenant in the paratroopers — tall, strong, redheaded, a tattoo on his neck proclaiming loyalty to the homeland, an indelible mark proving where his priorities lay. Country before all. Was he like that too? Was he like his father, or just a hollow shell?

  He couldn’t avoid that sick, horrible association. Every time he saw Andrea give her breast to a mouth that was not his, he felt like an intruder. He hardly dared to touch the baby, who stared at him unseeingly, searching for his voice like a blind man with wild eyes, wrinkling her little nose in recognition when he approached the rocking chair. It was as though he didn’t want to contaminate her, as though he couldn’t admit that jealousy and tenderness had been waging a fierce battle inside him from the moment she was born. And it was still unclear which of them was going to emerge victorious.

  That’s what he was thinking as he watched the fan blades rotate slowly, while Diana stroked his chest. So he told her.

  ‘It’s over between us.’

  But nothing is ever over. At least not when we think it should be, and not the way we want it to be. Life had taught him that lesson more than once — in the hands of his French cousin; in Cochard’s office; in the wind
ing road that had led him to where he sat now, a king presiding over a vast mountain of poison. But he didn’t want to hear that now, didn’t want to hear that pernicious voice, mocking him. He rushed to get dressed — as if the countdown had started and the apportioned time he had to win Andrea and Aroha back or lose them forever were dwindling — and as he did so, Arthur felt sure he could push back the boundaries of fate.

  The road narrowed and he came to a place where cones and construction fencing reduced the road to only lane. A detour led off to the right, on a secondary road that ran through a deserted town and then continued alongside a creek for a few hundred metres. The water wasn’t visible, but it was audible, gurgling under the embankment. He took the detour without slowing down or stopping at a stop sign partially obscured by brush.

  That was when he smashed into a car that was, at that precise instant, going the same direction he was.

  He slammed against the steering wheel and the seatbelt kept him from flying through the front windshield. For a few seconds he lost consciousness, and when he came to, he wondered what had happened. Had it not been for the evidence of the upside down vehicle on the embankment down below, its wheels spinning the wrong way, he might have thought he’d dreamed the whole thing. He stumbled out of the car, dizzy, and staggered fearfully to look over the edge.

  The creek was narrower to the right. On the opposite side of it lay a body, legs floating in the water. Arthur rushed down the embankment, tripped, fell and sprang back up. He rushed to the body. It was still breathing — a girl whose life was draining away as quickly as the torrent of her blood being washed down the creek, pouring from her ears, her mouth, her nose.