Gloria turned away in disgust. She couldn’t stand the sight of him, couldn’t stand his touch, his smell. He didn’t understand. She didn’t care what her son had done. He was the flesh of her flesh, and she’d have done the same thing — lie, betray, kill — but not to protect a memory, an idea. She’d have done it to save his life. Her eyes focused on Arthur’s portrait and she suddenly leapt up and rushed to the pencil holder on the desk. She snatched a pair of scissors and, before Ian or Guzmán had a chance to react, she lunged at the canvas and stabbed it one, two, three, four times, howling like an animal.
The two men stood staring, not daring to intervene, and waited until Gloria dropped the scissors, exhausted, and left the room.
‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she said to Ian as she left.
Guzmán picked the scissors up off the floor. They were sharp. He gazed impassively at the painting, now in shreds, from which half of one eye stared out.
‘I pity you, Ian. I really do. Your determination to preserve everything at any cost is what made you lose it all.’
Ian glared at him, livid. He could fight Guzmán, maybe get the scissors off him, but there was no way he’d emerge victorious. Anticipating his thoughts, Guzmán opened his mouth in reproach and pointed to the Glock tucked into his waistband.
‘You shouldn’t have killed Magnus’ widow. She had no part in this, she only wanted to help you and forget about it all, move on with her life.’
‘Nobody could move on with their life after being implicated in something like this.’
Guzmán’s face hardened. He walked to the office door and turned the key that was in the lock.
‘That’s right. And that brings me to the part of this whole conversation that interests me. I’m in a hurry to get this over with. I’ve got a plane to catch. So we’re just going to skip the usual protocol.’
With no warning he pulled out the pistol and fired a shot point-blank into Ian’s knee.
‘Where is Arthur’s daughter? What did you do with her? I’ve got twelve bullets in this clip. And I’ll fire them one by one until you tell me. Hand, elbow, foot, shoulder … You get the picture.’
Dolores arrived in the early evening that day, as she did every Tuesday, her day off. The bus to her employers’ suburb was nearly empty. ‘They’ll shut down this route any day now,’ the driver said. ‘Public transportation gives rich people the willies. It’s too democratic. Smells like humanity.’ What would she do if they cut the only bus route that went anywhere close to their house? ‘Strike it rich, Dolores,’ was the driver’s sardonic suggestion.
The first thing she found odd, which she later told the police, was that Señor Ian’s office door was locked from the outside. He always left the key on the inside of that door. She knocked but didn’t dare enter.
The second surprise made her faint, giving her a nasty bump on the head where she hit the porcelain toilet bowl. That, she later claimed, was why it took her so long to call the police. I was unconscious for at least fifteen minutes, and the only reason I came to was because the bathtub water wet my face and woke me up. She’d walked in to find water pooling on Señora Tagger’s bedroom floor; it was coming from beneath the bathroom door. When she opened it, she found the señora naked, in the tub, arms hanging over the tiled sides.
Gloria had devised a tremendous, dramatic end to her life. She’d drowned herself in the tub, filling it with warm water and bath salts. Prior to that she’d put on Chopin’s nocturne, in memory of her son’s paternal grandmother. Beside the tub lay an uncorked bottle of very good wine and the remains of a joint. She’d taken the time to fold her clothes carefully. And in case she regretted her decision at the last minute, she’d also swallowed an entire bottle of strong sleeping pills. But in the end she hadn’t even struggled.
24
Situated on a steep narrow street, with its awning rolled up and no sign aside from a small nameplate on the door, Chez Farida was a little slice of Algeria in Madrid’s Tirso de Molina neighbourhood. The place was decorated in traditional Algerian style, and customers sat at low tables, on benches covered with colourful cushions. From time to time, the owner let Algerian artists display their work on the rust-coloured walls. Ibrahim frequented the place regularly to sate his cravings for good Machwi home-cooking, cheap platters of grilled meat, potato croquettes, and honey-drenched desserts. That day, there were very few customers. The girl waiting tables gave him an informal greeting and pointed to a table near the kitchen, where the cook could be heard bustling around with saucepans to the joyous sound of Chaabi music on the stereo, turned low.
Arthur arrived ten minutes later. He too liked the restaurant’s traditional cuisine and cosy atmosphere. They met there every once in awhile, and always sat chatting awhile after their meal. But that day Arthur was in a hurry and not in the mood to talk. He refused the menu and ordered a draft beer, dropping heavily down onto the bench.
‘So, what was so important?’ he asked.
Ibrahim was drumming his fingers on the tablecloth to the beat of the music and staring at the black and white photos on the wall. They were all portraits of Algerians, people who life had not been kind to and whose suffering was reflected in their expressions — some unsociable, others staring into the camera with what seemed a direct accusation. Portraits of old farmers with wild manes of hair, women with the hint of a moustache visible above their wrinkled smiles, gleeful gap-toothed children in their underwear, leaping from a rock into the sea. The timeless snapshots — taken by an unknown artist hoping to sell one or two under the mistaken assumption that people find the suffering of others interesting — contrasted strikingly with the actual faces of the few customers there: young Algerians in baggy jeans and Real Madrid shirts smoking cigarettes, married couples sharing a few lamb kebabs with their ill-behaved children, who sat drinking Coke. There are always two sides to reality, Ibrahim thought. And nostalgia was the more ambiguous side.
‘Where is your father buried?’ Ibrahim asked suddenly. Arthur gave him a sidelong glance, one eyebrow cocked.
‘In the common grave of a municipal cemetery in a small town in the province of Málaga, where he was killed. My mother didn’t have the money to have him exhumed. And later, I chose not to. Why would I?’
‘Do you ever visit him?’
‘No. Why are you asking me all this?’
Ibrahim pointed to a picture hanging on the wall to the right of their table. It was a strange photo, full of grey tones that lent a certain tension to the low-lying clouds, from which emerged a hill where a Berber shepherd stood wrapped in a threadbare blanket. The shepherd and his dog had their backs to the camera and looked out at the desert horizon before them.
‘Those are the hills of Djebel Adjdir. That’s where my father is buried. Though you can’t see it, behind that desert, out past where the shepherd is looking, is the sea. I like to imagine that my father is looking this way, that his eyes are following me wherever I go.’
Arthur glanced at the photo disinterestedly. Ibrahim wasn’t often nostalgic.
‘Did you know my father was a militant in the FLN? He was very active during the war of independence. For years, we had to keep secret the place where he was buried. The authorities didn’t like martyrs and didn’t want his grave to turn into a site of pilgrimage. If it were up to them, they’d have exhumed the body and thrown it into a common grave, but in the end, the passage of time accomplished what they couldn’t do. Nobody really thinks about those days, or those heroes, anymore. There are no more pilgrims, no more flowers; nobody writes prayers or pledges on scraps of paper to leave under rocks. The heroes of yesterday make all the more obvious how mediocre the heroes of today are.’
He looked at Arthur and felt as though time had come to a standstill, as though he were no longer sitting at that table.
‘I’m leaving Madrid. I want to live out the rest of my days in Algeria.’
/> Arthur stared at him in shock.
‘You can’t — when you were released, that was one of the conditions of your probation. If you leave Spain and stop going to court every two weeks, you’ll be declared a fugitive of the law.’
‘I have no intention of coming back.’
‘You don’t have a passport; you’d be stopped at the border.’
Ibrahim smiled. Papers, walls. Man-made creations can’t stop the wind. People were wandering in and out of the restaurant, coming and going, burdened by the weight of their lives. They didn’t realise they were free.
‘I’ll manage.’
Arthur was disconcerted by Ibrahim’s enigmatic air.
‘What are you going to do? Go back to arms trafficking? To drugs? To fighting? You’re not a young man anymore, and Algeria is no country for the weak.’
Ibrahim nodded as he fingered the scar on his cheek. He wasn’t the same man. Wounds can be healed. With time, with patience, with determination.
‘There’s something else I wanted to tell you. I’ve asked Andrea to come with me.’
Arthur let out a nervous laugh.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Ibrahim took a deep breath and told him everything.
‘I’ve been in love with her since we were children, since long before you even met her. That’s the only reason you managed to stay alive in prison all these years.’
He was just a kid from the slums — dirty, sickly, shirtless, spending his days torn between fear and the need to be what he was: a twelve-year-old boy with sleep in his eyes who found the desperate urge to live intoxicating. He had already started playing the ney back then and claimed he knew the secrets of sema, the sacred whirling of the dervishes. He would talk to, look at, laugh with, and kiss any girl who’d let him. And he especially liked that shy little wisp of a girl who lived in Bab el Oued. They went swimming naked together on the beach, and it was in the surf that they first began to touch. At first pretending to dunk each other, their touching quickly became much more tender, and awkward, and direct. And there, hiding behind a barge, he kissed her with what he thought was expertise, but all she did was spit on the ground, the way a man would, and tell him she didn’t like that tongue-in-the-mouth business. Later came train trips to Hydra, and afternoons spent in the reservoir to cool off and rinse away the salty seawater. And nights on the balcony gazing out over the sea, returning to Algiers with their wet underwear in a little plastic bag, her shamefaced expression and his triumph at having stolen a real tongue kiss.
He told his brother he was in love with the daughter of the owner of the Paris Bookstore, said he was going to marry her and move to France.
‘The bookseller? That pig is a collaborator, a police informer — he gives the OAS tip-offs. He’s a murderer!’ his brother had shouted.
What did a word like murderer mean to a twelve-year-old? What breadth or depth could the concept of death have in his young brain? Yes, his father was dead, and he regularly heard shots fired at night, and saw his brother come home in the middle of the night with blood on his clothes that wasn’t always his. He lived surrounded by violence and could chant as loud as anyone the anti-European slogans that leaders of the struggle repeated like mantras; he knew the new Algerian anthem composed by Mufdi Zakariyah by heart: We are soldiers in the name of righteousness. So what? The only thing he truly wanted was for Friday to come so he could go to the beach and swim naked with Andrea. He could see that, in his brother’s eyes, and in the sorrowful silence of his mother, he was a bad Muslim, a bad son, a bad brother, and a bad patriot. But as far as Ibrahim was concerned, the whole world, the whole crazy world, could go to hell. He was happy.
‘I don’t care. I’m going to go with her and …’
The first blow split his lower lip. The second struck him right in the nose.
‘You’re a traitor to your blood and to your country,’ his brother hissed, still clenching his fist like a threat. Ibrahim watched the drops of blood dripping into the palm of his hand and gave his brother a look of deep rage. He felt conned, betrayed by his own kin.
‘Go to your room, Ibrahim,’ his mother had said, her voice trembling. Her body seemed to have shrunk, as though she were trying to become invisible.
‘But …’
‘Go to your room!’
He was miserable and didn’t understand. How could his desire to be happy infuriate them so? Ibrahim’s childhood became the slow monotonous passage of time and the muffled sounds of the street, the passing of cars that frightened his brother if they stopped any longer than necessary close to the door. ‘Ibrahim, go see who that is,’ he’d whisper, always prepared to take off, running through the inner courtyards. Always on edge, waiting, overcome by fear ever since the OAS terrorists had executed his father. Now it was his brother who had taken the mantle. And when he fell, Ibrahim would be the one to continue the struggle. And meanwhile, they waited, listening to the fiery speeches of Boudiaf and Ben Bella, the heroes of the Battle of Algiers, in which his father had fought General Massu’s paratroopers. But he had no desire to be a martyr for his country, like his father and brother. All he wanted was to be with Andrea.
That was when he’d heard the sound of tyres on their unpaved street — a dark car with its lights out; three men emerged. Dark cars arriving suddenly in the night with their lights out meant only one thing. Suddenly, all of their neighbours’ lights went out too.
They were coming for them. Ibrahim ran to tell his mother and brother. But he got there at almost the same time that the front door — a flimsy composite-wood board — splintered and flew open. In the blink of an eye, his brother jumped out a small window overlooking the back patio, no time to put on his shirt. As he jumped, he lost one sandal, which his mother picked up, turning to face the three men, wielding it the way she did whenever she went to swat Ibrahim for whatever thing he’d done that had riled her — and there had been lots of them. But this time one of the men effortlessly snatched it away, giving her a swift kick in the stomach that dropped her to the floor with a dull groan.
The other two intruders were too beefy to slip through the window easily and they took some time getting out. The third one stayed with him and his mother. A handsome man, tall, with the olive skin of those who’ve spent a long time in the desert. Redheaded. On one side of his thick wrestler’s neck he had a tattoo of a pair of wings with a dagger piercing them through the middle. And a slogan: Country before all. Rushing toward his mother, who was still collapsed on the ground, Ibrahim blocked his way, shouting his head off. The man hadn’t seen him at first and was thrown off for a moment. But he reacted quickly, with a look of profound disgust. His enormous hand, hairy and calloused, clenched Ibrahim’s face with excruciating force. Ibrahim’s feet were lifted off the floor, and then he was hurled like a rag against the wall, once, twice, three times. Until he lost consciousness.
When he opened his eyes, he saw his shirt was soaked with blood. His mother had a black eye and her dress was torn; she covered one dark, shrivelled breast in shame, but she looked proud, almost smiling, and gazed lovingly at him. She told him to be strong. That everything comes to an end, even the most terrible pain.
The men who had gone after his brother were frustrated and sweating. One of them wielded a .38 and said that he’d shot at him but wasn’t sure if he’d hit him. His brother knew the nearby labyrinthine alleyways like the back of his hand, knew every cul-de-sac and plaza and wall in the neighbourhood; he was smart and fast and hadn’t been caught. And Ibrahim was happy that those bastards hadn’t been able to lay a hand on his brother. They’d been thwarted and were now angry.
It didn’t occur to him that that made things worse for him and his mother.
The man with the tattooed neck stepped forward.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked, wrapping his hands around Ibrahim’s neck and rattling him back and forth as
though attempting to shake his head off. He took Ibrahim’s chin in one hand and stared into his face, sneering. Ibrahim wrenched his head away and managed to free himself of his cold fingers. But the redhead just grabbed him again, tighter, and forced him to show him his teeth. Teeth that until that moment had been beautiful, full of songs and stories.
‘Where’s your brother, handsome? I know he’s around here, hiding in a pile of shit like the rat that he is. If you scream loud enough, if I make you scream, do you think he’ll come out of his hiding place, or will he stay hiding and just watch you suffer? What if I start on your mother? What do you say? You love your mother. Will you ask him to turn himself in?’
Ibrahim didn’t reply. He couldn’t, with that hand clamped over his mouth. He didn’t know what came over him, why he did it, but all of a sudden he bit the huge hairy hand as hard as he could — a hand that smelled of gunpowder and cigarettes and military shoe polish. He bit it as hard as he could until he tasted blood.
The redhead let out a howl of pain and punched Ibrahim in the face with his other hand, but the kid was like a leech, he wouldn’t let go. And then the man took out a machete, which he kept in a sheath strapped to his calf. It was a long military knife, with a sharp serrated blade that curled back at the tip. The steel handle had a compass on it. Ibrahim felt the impact of that steel like a medieval club destroying his teeth. Whipped into a frenzy, the tattooed man straightened up, holding his injured hand. One of the other men kicked Ibrahim and he tasted the dog shit on the sole of his military boot. Then the tattooed man dropped to his knees as hard as he could on Ibrahim’s chest while another held him down, and the third beat his mother senseless.
The Heart Tastes Bitter Page 47