The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  ‘The lady of the house isn’t in,’ she said, sprinkling the yolks with a few grains of salt.

  Eduardo sat on a chair watching her bustle around, one end of the cardboard tube, containing the portrait, on the floor and the other between his knees. He’d brought it with him. If Gloria wasn’t there, he wondered, why had the housekeeper called, asking him to come?

  ‘There’s someone else who wants to see you — out back in the garden,’ she said, pre-empting his question as she dried her hands on a dishtowel. She put the plate of food on a tray and then added some finishing touches. ‘I’ll take you there.’

  The sunlight in the backyard fell onto a wrought-iron gazebo at a slant. The garden was a mess. Clearly, no one was taking care of the flowerbeds, which were overrun with weeds and wild poppies. Sitting at a chipped, white wrought-iron table was a broad-backed man in shirtsleeves, frowning in distaste as he observed the fallen petals of a rosebush climbing a trellis, covered in insects. Hearing Eduardo and Dolores’ footsteps, he turned, and his look of displeasure morphed into one of cordial curiosity. With boyish energy that seemed at odds with his relaxed, middle-aged demeanour, he skipped down the two steps of the gazebo to take the tray from the housekeeper.

  ‘At least some things haven’t changed. Your brunches are amazing,’ he said with a frank smile. The housekeeper smiled back, timidly. It was just bacon and fried eggs, and two tomato halves that shimmered with olive oil, she thought, wondering what kind of garbage they must eat in Australia.

  ‘This is Eduardo, sir. The artist you wanted to meet.’

  ‘Dolores, you’re never going to drop the “sir” business, are you? Is it really so hard to just call me Ian? It would help me feel less like a Windsor when I ask you for something.’ He turned to Eduardo and held out one hand, the tray of food balanced precariously in the other. ‘So, finally we meet. I’m Ian Mackenzie.’

  Eduardo had figured as much. Parents always leave some indelible trace on their children, making them recognisable anywhere. If Ian had reached his father’s age — forty? forty-five? — he’d probably have taken on that aristocratic-yet-carefree air, too, a blend of British gentleman and off-duty Californian actor.

  They sat in the speckled shade under the gazebo. Ian folded his hands over the tray, elbows on the table. For a second, Eduardo thought he was about to say a prayer. But he didn’t.

  ‘So, you’re the portrait artist Gloria hired. Kind of crazy. I bet you’ve never had a commission like that before. I don’t know what she was thinking when she called you, or what her intentions were. In fact I’ve never really known what she is thinking. Gloria is a unique woman — I imagine you’ve realised that by now.’

  Eduardo didn’t like the self-assured way he spoke about Gloria. He’d only met the guy five minutes ago and already Ian spoke with no inhibitions whatsoever. Or maybe Eduardo was just irked by the brazen way he occupied all the space, or by his familiarity with the housekeeper and the disingenuous praise he lavished on her without having even tasted her food, oblivious to the flies landing on his egg yolks. He was annoyed by Ian’s suntanned face, his just-for-show smile, his poise. It bothered him to picture Gloria in bed with him, the man’s hairy fingers touching the same skin he’d savoured only once, knowing even then that it was out of pity. And he knew his feelings were absurd.

  ‘I thought you were divorced,’ he said as casually as he could, waving away a sticky fly hovering over the tray.

  ‘Oh, we are. But that doesn’t mean we’re unable to come to an arrangement. I live in Australia; I moved there permanently shortly after Ian’s death, but I like to come back every once in a while for a little break — I did pay for this house, after all. It belongs to me and I belong to it,’ he said, although he spoke the words hesitantly, eyeing the abandoned-looking surroundings, the overgrown lawn, the dying flowers. If that place had once been his dream house, it had ended up a sad parody.

  After glancing around, his eyes came back to rest on Eduardo.

  ‘We could have been very happy here, the three of us. On occasion I think we were. But things never turn out the way you think. It’s not like in the movies; you can’t pick the perfect setting or direct the actors or control their entrances and exits; you can’t choose the lighting or the sound. You can’t cut-and-paste like in editing, so you end up with exactly what you had in mind.’

  Ian had taken a seat and was perched sideways, one leg crossed over the other. He took out a box of Australian cigarettes and placed it on the table without opening it. For a few seconds he toyed with it between his fingers.

  ‘So did you sleep with her?’ he asked impassively. He might have asked if his tooth hurt for as much as his expression changed. ‘I bet you did. Gloria can be irresistible when she puts her mind to it.’

  Eduardo felt his ears burning. He coughed timidly, ill-at-ease and annoyed at Ian’s snide expression.

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’

  ‘Because she wouldn’t tell me. And the fact is, I don’t really care.’

  ‘Then why ask me?’

  ‘Because you’ve been wanting to tell me since the moment we met. I’m guessing she didn’t speak very well of me, and the fact that you made love to her makes you see me as an intruder. Gloria is very good at that, too — getting people to believe what she wants them to believe. She’s both adorable and manipulative. Or at least she was, until Ian junior died.’

  He spoke about her as if the whole thing were so distant and yet he couldn’t let go. A story that excluded Eduardo. And he wanted him to know it.

  ‘I’d like to see your portrait of that guy, if you don’t mind. I’m curious.’

  Eduardo didn’t say no. He unscrewed the lid of the tube and pushed the tray of cold food to one side so he could spread out the portrait of Arthur.

  He’d picked it up that morning from Olga’s apartment. Eduardo wondered what had happened to her. He’d tried to get Mr Who to promise that he wouldn’t hurt her, but the young man would grant him no more than an ambiguous gesture that could have meant anything. Eduardo had handed her over with no concern for her wellbeing, but he hadn’t been able to shake the bittersweet feeling of guilt since.

  Ian stared at the portrait for several minutes, bent over it like a field marshal poring over a battle plan. He swept his gaze carefully up and down, left and right. His eyes were shining, but Eduardo didn’t know if it was in admiration of his artistic skill, or the emotion of seeing so closely the face of the man who’d killed his son and ruined his marriage. When he finished examining it he tut-tutted with a tinge of disappointment.

  ‘An ordinary man who just explodes into your world like a ball of fire and blows it all to pieces.’

  ‘I can assure you that Arthur is not an ordinary man, in any way.’

  Ian held up his hands as though trying to deflect a self-evident truth.

  ‘Maybe it’s just my own little fantasy. No matter how far I am, there hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t thought about that man, tried to figure out what he was thinking, if he had feelings anything like mine.’ He paused and walked to the trellis, observing the aphids making their way up a rose stem. ‘Or the way you feel. It must have been really hard to spend so much time painting the man who killed your family.’

  Eduardo had been rolling up the portrait carefully. Suddenly his hands froze.

  ‘What you talking about? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  Ian traced a finger across a leaf of the rosebush, covering his fingertip with a sticky substance. He wiped it against his thumb, but all that did was give him two sticky fingers. He thought the plant needed to be pruned quite severely, but doubted even that could save it. Whatever disease it had had already spread too far. It would be better to just pull it up from the roots and plant a new shoot.

  If only it were that easy with
people.

  He walked over to a leaky tap and washed his hand, then sniffed his fingers.

  ‘Arthur Fernandez was the man who killed your wife and daughter. It wasn’t the first time he’d been involved in a fatal accident. That was the real reason Gloria hired you. Let me put it this way: Arthur is the bridge between our two shores.’

  ‘You’re making that up.’

  ‘I most certainly am not. This portrait is the link between your tragedy and ours. Gloria knew that from the beginning. She’d thoroughly investigated you before she commissioned you.’

  Perhaps the police could have pressed charges against Arthur Fernández. After the accident, the police officer who came to see Eduardo in the hospital went to a lot of trouble, despite his slothful docility. The same man was removed from service on expulsion orders a few months later, over a murky case in which the officer was charged with a crime he swore he hadn’t committed. Prior to his dismissal he’d found clues pointing to Arthur. Details which, when viewed alone, might seem unconnected, but which made perfect sense — later fitting together like pieces of a puzzle for the ex-officer of the law who spent hours of his free time investigating further: receipts from a small hotel on the Toledo highway the night before the accident; a receipt for gas from a service station in the middle of nowhere — the owner recalled having seen someone very worked up on the phone, someone whose description matched Arthur’s.

  But shortly thereafter, Eduardo killed Teodoro on the streets of Madrid, just as that poor dogged officer had other, unrelated charges brought against him and was taken off the investigation. Inside Eduardo’s apartment, the police found Teodoro’s licence plate number jotted down on a piece of paper and verified that he’d gotten it by consulting the Directorate General of Traffic archives. Teo’s vehicle was the same make and model as the one involved in the hit-and-run. There was even a report issued by an expert that indicated that the SUV had a dent in the bumper that had been recently repaired. As far as the new investigators on the case were concerned, it was clear from the beginning: although Eduardo never confessed his motives for attacking Teo and his family, they were certain Teo was the man who’d caused the accident and that Eduardo had taken justice into his own hands. Case closed.

  They forgot all about Arthur Fernández. And about Eduardo Quintana, too. The roads were full of scumbags who committed hit-and -runs. Sometimes they got caught; sometimes they didn’t. The sentences for manslaughter and failure to provide assistance weren’t worth the expenditure of long-term investigations. But a murder in the centre of Madrid in broad daylight — now, that caused the sort of pandemonium on the streets that the State could not and would not accept. So they locked him up for thirteen years and threw away the key.

  But the investigation hadn’t ended for Gloria. A few months after Ian died, she began looking into Arthur’s life. She wasn’t simply searching for incriminating evidence — the police, after all, had caught him at the scene; there was no way he could claim innocence. But it was much more than that. She wanted to find out everything she could about his past, his family — anything. It turned into an obsession. Over those four years she’d spent a good part of her wealth paying private investigators, many of whom were unscrupulous, cheating and deceiving her, wheedling money out of her. She’d also ruined her marriage. Ian had tried to convince her that what she was doing was insane, pointless. But she didn’t listen, not to him or anyone. She’d even auctioned off the most important part of her past — her violin. Though she’d concealed her true motivation for selling it, she had actually auctioned it off to the Ministry of Culture simply because she needed the money.

  And then one day a man showed up at her house — a short, sickly, decrepit man. He had a rubber-banded manila folder under one arm, clippings and photos spilling out the sides. He smoked like a chimney and spoke so softly she could hardly understand what he said. The guy was cagey, acting like he was convinced he was being watched everywhere he went, and was unable to sit still. He had tics and tremors, and his right eyelid twitched compulsively. While explaining things, he lost the thread at times, but when the man got to the contents of that folder, which he protected like a priceless treasure, what he said was astonishing. That downcast little man was the ex-officer who’d first been assigned Eduardo’s case. And just like Gloria, he was obsessed with Arthur Fernández.

  Maybe the police had thought that the case was solved, and unprosecutable — but not him. He told her he felt there had been some sort of conspiracy to get him taken off Eduardo’s case. He swore to Gloria that the investigation had cost him his job on the force and six years in a Guadalajara prison, and that it had all been engineered after he disobeyed repeated orders to stop ‘fucking around’, as he phrased it. He’d appealed numerous times but no one had paid any attention. The proof against him was compelling, and in the end he had descended — definitively — into the deep pit of anonymity and desperation of someone who’d been chewed up and spat out by the forces of power. When he got out of jail, he managed to scrape together a living as a two-bit private investigator. That was how he’d heard Gloria had been going around asking questions about Arthur Fernández.

  Brimming with emotion, he showed her the result of his years of effort, years when he’d never stopped searching for clues and evidence against the man who was now a thousand times richer and more powerful than he’d been fourteen years ago, while the ex-officer himself was a thousand times more insignificant.

  ‘But the tiniest germs are the ones that bring down the giants. I’m like a simple cold that turns into deadly pneumonia,’ he said, laughing like a madman.

  Then he showed Gloria invoices from Arthur’s firm, signed by someone in the Chicago office, paying off distant relations of the officers who had been involved in the investigation back in the early days. He also managed to find out that a few months after Eduardo was locked up, Arthur’s car — a black SUV — was repaired at a body shop in Pau, a small city on the French side of the Basque Country. The repairs consisted of an alignment, the kind performed after a head-on, and the replacing of the entire front right panel. Then the car was painted another colour and sold by the firm. The little man showed Gloria receipts proving that the vehicle’s export documentation had been falsified.

  ‘Eduardo fucked up,’ he said, scratching his head as though he had lice. And maybe he did. ‘He killed the wrong man. Arthur is one son of a bitch.’

  Gloria later verified everything that man had said. She even went to the place Arthur had supposedly spent the night with someone, though the hotel no longer existed. She managed to find the gas station, where she filled up and spoke to the cafeteria owner, who corroborated what the ex-police officer had said: late that night, someone matching Arthur’s description had been there and had spoken to somebody on the phone.

  When she got back to Madrid, she tried to contact the ex-officer, but he seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. Though she never learned this, the little man’s name was Alberto Antequera. He was forty-six years old and hailed from a place called Villafranca de los Barros, in the province of Badajoz. At the time he was discharged from the force and sentenced to six years in prison, he was in his twentieth year of service and had a spotless record. He had two children: Alberto, who was eight years old, and Fátima, who was five. His wife, Rosa, managed to hold things together while he was in prison, but she couldn’t handle his subsequent mental breakdown. She ended up leaving him and had a judge issue a restraining order. He never saw them again.

  In the slums where he lived after being released from jail, they called him ‘San Vito’ — after Vitus the patron saint of epileptics — because he was always trembling. A few people held him in high regard and gave him token odd jobs, as a reminder of the good times, but most of them either scorned or ignored him. Two weeks after contacting Gloria, he was found stabbed to death in Puente de Vallecas. A month later, the presumed perps were arrested: two minors who were
up to their eyeballs on coke and had tried to steal his watch.

  Thanks to Alberto — who Gloria never found out anything about — she did manage to find out about the existence of someone named Eduardo Quintana.

  She was able to get in contact with him through his agent, Olga. She’d already found out that he’d just gotten out of a psychiatric ward and was doing high-volume portraits for shopping malls, that he lived in Lavapiés, and that every morning he went to Parque de El Retiro, where he had a date with his past near the Crystal Palace. For days, she followed him and watched him sketch in a notebook and drink heavily in nearby bars. She wanted to be sure he was as broken as she was, be sure that when she proposed the job, he’d accept. And maybe, deep down, she was also hoping to find a kindred spirit. Together they’d summon the courage to do what Eduardo had done fourteen years ago. But this time, to the right man. The man who had ruined their lives.

  Ian gave Eduardo a look of pity.

  ‘You knew that. You had to know it somehow. Nothing in life is pure chance, but sometimes we opt to feign ignorance of certain things.’

  Eduardo thought about each of the times he’d met with Gloria. A little voice inside him had told him that she was messing with him, that Eduardo was nothing but a pawn on the first line of attack, the one who struck first, driving a wedge into the enemy’s defences only to be sacrificed. Ian was right. He’d known all along, but he’d denied it, even to himself, clinging to her in order to keep from suffocating, in order to keep breathing a little longer. Just a little while longer.

  Ian paused the image. Without touching it, he caressed his son’s face. A boy of six or seven, his eyes deep, a little sad, disconcerted. He had a naive air about him, a freckled face and a haircut too childish for his age — side part, bangs plastered to his forehead. As if nothing could ever happen to him, as if Ian would always be right there to protect him.

  That was over Christmas, one year at Ian senior’s parents’ house in Wales. There was a river there, high above the village, which dried out in the summer, leaving nothing but pebbles, garbage and rotting sticks in its course. Only in the springtime, and the first two weeks of summer if you were lucky, could you catch anything but dead rats in that water. And yet his son loved it there. He remembered that, ever since Ian junior was a little boy, with the good looks of a grown man, he’d walk along the trail of acacias lining the river as if searching for the signs of a past he’d yet to live.