The child within him died that night, as two strangers held him down while the curved tip of the machete tore through the muscles in his face, shredding his skin. There — shouting through the rivers of blood clouding the dilated pupils of his eyes — the boy inside him died, staring uncomprehendingly at the trembling mass that was his mother, who no longer screamed but simply gazed at him lovingly, sacrificing herself, as though soaking up all of her son’s pain, not only the pain he was already feeling but also that to come.
Mutilated children grow into incomplete men, incapable of truly feeling anything, experiencing only counterfeit love, passion, and joy. They find fleeting moments of happiness which are always hanging by a thread, lest a nightmare, a glance, or a memory suddenly pop into their heads and reopen the wound, letting it air.
Ibrahim looked at Arthur.
‘That’s why anyone who steals a person’s childhood has to be destroyed. Because the worst crime you can commit is to steal someone’s hope, destroy their soul. That’s what your father, Lieutenant Luis Fernández, did to me.’
Arthur sat looking petrified, his mouth ajar. He was staring at Ibrahim, searching his eyes, shocked and frightened.
‘That can’t be true,’ he said, his voice broken.
Ibrahim pointed to his scar.
‘Here’s your proof.’
Still, Arthur shook his head and swallowed.
‘This is ludicrous, it makes no sense at all.’
It made perfect sense, it was destiny, and destiny is a sort of justice.
‘Do you remember the first time I saw you in our cell? It was like looking at your father. You’re almost identical. And when you told me about your past, I knew you were the son of the lieutenant who ruined my whole life. I’d have killed you right then, but you pulled out your honeymoon picture and put it up on the wall. You smiled and told me your wife’s name. And then I saw that Allah is wise, and no matter how long the road, it always leads someplace. You brought her back to me.’
Ibrahim stood and looked at him coldly.
‘The Armenian is outside. I told him you’d be here.’
Arthur tensed and then ducked sideways, cowering. The Armenian stood in the entrance with his back against the door, and behind him rose the shaved head of a giant with a tattooed neck. Arthur whipped back to Ibrahim, livid.
‘You can’t punish me for something I didn’t do. I could never do what he did to you. I am not my father.’
‘Of course you are. We’re all our fathers. I look at you and I see him, and my blood boils. You have the same expression, the same red hair, the same way of twisting your mouth. You can’t escape that.’
Arthur stood.
‘You have no right to pass on me!’
Ibrahim grabbed his arm.
‘You can try to run, but if you do Andrea will never find out what really happened to Aroha. The Armenian knows all sorts of people involved in human trafficking. Nobody disappears without leaving a trace, and these men can find anyone. I made a deal with him: your life in exchange for the information leading to Aroha.’
Arthur frowned. He went pale. All he could do was glower at Ibrahim.
‘Who do you think you are, making deals on my life? Guzmán is going to find Aroha, I don’t need the Armenian for anything.’
Ibrahim didn’t lose his cool. He let go of Arthur’s arm and spread his hands to show he wasn’t going to stand in his way. The decision is yours, he seemed to say: back door, or front door.
Arthur’s eyes, wild with fear, glanced quickly at the door. The Armenian was ambling over, hands in his pockets, casual-like.
‘It’s you or Aroha,’ Ibrahim repeated.
Arthur chose the back door. Fear propelled him through the kitchen door as fast as he could go. The Armenian’s skinhead thug went after him. Almost immediately came the sound of plates crashing to the floor and the cook shouting, asking what the hell was going on.
‘Why’d you tell him? That’s not what we agreed,’ the Armenian asked, half-angry and half-smiling. The regulars were eyeing him warily. He wasn’t one of them; he stuck out like a black stain on a white shirt, a stain that ruined the fabric.
Ibrahim gazed at the photo on the wall of the shepherd and his dog.
‘We’ve all got a right to prove what we’re really made of. Now Arthur knows what he’s made of. He won’t get far, regardless. I know exactly where he’s headed.’
The Armenian gave him a curious look, maybe even with a flicker of envy and admiration.
‘So it’s true, you really do have principles.’ He said it as if Ibrahim were a leper, suffering his disease with dignity. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to him. On it was an address with map coordinates. ‘You’ll find the girl here.’
Ibrahim read what was on the paper.
‘Alive?’
The Armenian made a noncommittal face.
‘Possibly. Some things it’s best not to ask too insistently. I called in enough favours as it is to get this paper. There are certain circumstances that even people like you and me shouldn’t get involved in. You should go, Ibrahim. Go back to your village and don’t look back. That’s my advice.’
Ibrahim put the paper away. The only advice he’d ever listened to in his life had come from a man who was buried on a hill beside his father.
‘I’ll tell you where Arthur’s headed.’
Since she was a little girl, Aroha had had trouble waking up. She was slow to get moving in the mornings and spent ages in bed, yawning and lolling around; the minute her mother turned away she’d fall back asleep as though nothing outside of her bedroom were of any interest. Irritated and tired of calling her, Andrea would ask Arthur to get her up. He’d go into her room without turning on the light, run his fingers through her dishevelled hair and kiss her forehead, whispering quietly until, little by little, she emerged from her dream and her grogginess. He was the only one who’d had the patience required to make his daughter get up without grumbling, so she wasn’t late to school every day. Aroha preferred that he be the one to take her to school, too, and back then she didn’t mind holding his hand all the way up the school steps. Her friends would be there waiting, eating sunflower seeds and spitting shells all over the ground. They were a gaggle of uniforms — red polo shirts with the school’s gold emblem embroidered over the chest, plaid skirts, and grey knee-socks — that swarmed like a wasp’s nest when he arrived, straining to see Arthur hand his daughter her notebook and give her a bear hug, wrapping his arms around her tiny body with only part of her head sticking out.
‘My friends think you’re cool.’ Cool, said with a strawberry candy stuck in her mouth, her braces turning each smile into a glinting metallic scene of torture.
His daughter’s voice came to him now from far away: You’re the best father in the world, she’d say. The world? he’d ask. The whole wide world and part of the universe. And he would respond, That’s better. When she was a little girl, he was her hero.
But at some point she had stopped needing him to go wake her up because she was doing it all by herself, before the alarm went off, before Andrea even had to call her. There were little changes, like when he asked her to sit and talk with him for awhile, she’d make up any excuse not to and then immediately lock herself in his office to talk on the phone, sharing secrets that he wasn’t privy to with a stranger. Who? he wondered. At first Arthur would tell himself that these things were tolerable defeats, changes that all kids go through as they grow up and move on.
He shouldn’t have accepted her growing detachment without a fight. He should have paid more attention to the alarm bells that started going off that summer. I need money. And he’d give it to her as long as she’d just chat with him, or give him a kiss, or a hug. He was buying her affection, but any fondness on her part was increasingly scarce — and expensive. He’d ask her how school was going. F
ine. Ask her what books she was reading. Whatever. Are you going to give me the money? If he asked too many questions, she’d get upset — so he stopped asking. You’d better at least pass, he told her. Get off my case, I will. Are you going to give me the money or not? He often wanted to know why she needed so much. It was always a trip to Valencia with her girlfriends, a weekend of horseback riding in the mountains, a new personal stereo. And he’d give it to her.
It was as she neared adolescence that slowly the real problems began: running away from home, them having to call the police, derelict boyfriends who were always much older, constant rebellion, arguments, fights, slammed doors, the early signs that she was flirting with drugs. Useless trips to the psychologist. Multiple expulsions from school.
Suddenly, he’d lost her, without even realising. She was no longer his little girl, no longer belonged to him. And in her eyes he began to see reproach and accusation. She’d figured out what kind of man her father was, knew that he was cheating on her mother, realised he tried to make up for prolonged absences with material gifts.
He wasn’t home the day Aroha disappeared. He didn’t see her brush her teeth — by then freed of their metallic corset — didn’t see her brush her hair and walk out the door, never to return. At the time, there was a different woman he was seeing in the mirror, in a hotel room. A glimmering naked body that smiled at his reflection in the mirror and offered herself to him. While his daughter was on the road to her perdition, he was screwing a woman he’d never love — not the way he loved Andrea and Aroha — up the arse. And that tortured him. Why? Why had he done it? he wondered. He’d thrown his life away, aware of what he was doing at every step. He’d never know for certain, but maybe the answer was to be found in that inner voice, the one that called him a phony every time happiness seemed on the horizon. Maybe he didn’t deserve to be happy.
It wasn’t too late, he said to himself, blinking at the sun in his eyes. He got out of the car feeling convinced that Andrea still loved him, unable to believe what Ibrahim had told him was true. She wouldn’t betray him like that. He just needed to see her one more time, to look into her eyes, to make her realise how sorry he was about the past. He could change — people change. Guzmán had finally found out where Aroha was, they didn’t need the Armenian at all. They’d go away together, the three of them, and start anew — this time for real.
His eyes feverish, his mind racing, he strode across the residence parking lot, not noticing the two silhouettes that appeared between the cars until it was too late.
The Armenian cut him off, while his attack dog hung back to make sure he had no escape route. Arthur tried to turn back, but realised there was no way out.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he stammered, trying not to lose sight of the enormous skinhead lurking like a hungry wolf behind him. ‘I’ll pay you anything you want if you let us go. Name your price, anything.’
The Armenian’s eyes glimmered like a torch at the back of a dark cave.
‘How much is a daughter’s life worth? How much did you pay to try to get yours back?’
Without thinking, the giant goon leapt at Arthur. Arthur managed to dodge the fist roaring past his ear like a freight train, and instinctively jammed his elbow back as hard as he could, breaking the skinhead’s nose. Stunned, the Armenian’s thug raised his hands to his face with an animal howl, but he didn’t fall. Arthur tried to use his advantage to fell him, but the man writhed in rage and clamped onto his trachea with one had, immobilising him, and then raised the other fist to deliver a single, definitive blow.
‘Not here!’ the Armenian shouted. The giant froze, his fist in midair, trembling with rage. For a few seconds he hesitated, but then finally exhaled and lowered his fist. ‘To the car.’
He couldn’t tell where they were. Someplace in the mountains, probably, he thought. Far from Madrid. Wherever he looked, all he saw were pine trees and a winding back road that disappeared behind a hill. It was getting dark. The first stars were twinkling in the hazy dusk. Warm air whispered through the tall grass at Arthur’s feet. They’d taken off his shoes and socks and chained him to a rock. The sharp edges bit into the inside of his wrists, forcing him to bend over to reduce the tension. The Armenian was sitting on a tree stump with a twig in his mouth and a song in his head, humming quietly, eyes half-closed, body swaying slightly to the rhythm. A few metres further on, the Armenian’s gorilla was pissing on a bush, tracing a huge arc with his stream of urine. His nose had swollen up like a potato and his face was stained with dried blood.
The Armenian opened his eyes wide and spat the sprig out.
‘When I was a kid, families used to come here to get away from the city for the day. My father would load up the old Seat 600 with folding chairs and a camp table. My mother would bring pig’s snout, ear, and oxtail, and we’d stuff ourselves silly. Back then nobody worried about forest fires — everybody built campfires and they didn’t make people get a municipal licence. Things were more straightforward back then. After lunch, my parents would spread a blanket out in the shade and take a siesta while I set off exploring. This stump used to be an amazing old pine tree — huge. They say you can tell how old a tree is by the rings in its trunk and this one was really old. I remember one day I tried to climb to the highest branch, but I fell and cracked my head open. My parents didn’t even realise it until they woke up and saw the blood. After taking me to the clinic, where I got five stitches, my father spent the whole way home smacking me for having ruined his day out, and my mother cried the whole time.’
He gave a little laugh, as though the memory were tragically comic, and then looked at Arthur curiously.
‘I bet you’ve never climbed a tree.’
Slowly, night fell over the countryside, enshrouding it in a veil of shadows. Everything was still there, even though it looked like it was gone. The Armenian sighed, gazing out at the bloodstained horizon.
‘I’ve often imagined I was just a regular man. That my daughter was climbing this tree — but I wasn’t taking a siesta, I was waiting down below with my arms stretched out wide to catch her in case she fell. It sounds absurd. The things a man imagines when he’s spent half his life locked up; the things he thinks he’ll do when he gets out. But the truth is that no one builds campfires anymore because it’s against the law, and the tree was cut down long ago, and this place has become a dump, full of used condoms and cans and cigarette butts, a place where hookers and junkies come for a day out. And the truth is I no longer have a daughter to worry about her falling and getting hurt.’
He gazed sadly at Arthur and hesitated a moment, trying to calibrate the effect of his words.
‘When the cup of bitterness runs over, the heart no longer suffers, because it no longer feels. I stopped torturing myself over things that never were and never will be; I gave up on the questions that no one can answer, because they have no answer, because there is no God to console me. And since that time, the only thing that’s brought me any peace over these past four years has been the knowledge that one day we’d be right here, you and me, just like this, and that before I killed you, I’d speak these words to you.’
He signalled to his henchman and the giant went to the car and took from the trunk a duffel bag, with a saw and an axe handle sticking out.
The Armenian stood and began to roll up his sleeves. He showed Arthur the sharp blade of a machete, his face darkening into a scowl. The Armenian had sworn he’d take revenge, and he had to keep that promise. He’d earned a reputation and he had to keep it, because men like him needed the respect that they earned spilling blood to survive. So Arthur’s death had to be remembered for years — prisoners huddling together to talk about it on the yard, wardens shivering on hearing the details, new inmates finding out who the Armenian was the second they set foot in the prison.
‘I’m going to peel you like an orange, with a machete like the one your father used on Ibrahim; then my frie
nd here is going to chop you up into little pieces, and I’ll scatter your remains around this mountain for kilometres so all the vermin can feast on you. Though I think I’ll save your heart and take it to your wife so that she can see it before I tear her eyes out and kill her too. I know I promised Ibrahim I wouldn’t hurt her, but we both know I can’t keep that promise. There will be nothing left of you, Arthur, nothing left of what you were or what you created in this life. You and your loved ones will never have existed. And the most important thing is that you’re going to die without knowing what happened to your daughter, not knowing whether anything you did — the harm and suffering you caused — was of any use at all.’
25
May always left the scent of storms moving out. In the pond by the house, toads peeked out with their bulging eyes, staring at her. Olga set her suitcase on the ground, reluctant to push the door open. Coming back was a form of defeat, that’s the way she felt about it. The stones on the facade welcomed her with a blunt expression; the weeds growing in a long-forgotten flowerpot greeted her mockingly. She had actually believed she could win, could get out of this place and never come back, push the bounds of her destiny and escape. But here she was again. And her brightly coloured wheelie suitcase announced that she was back to stay.
She pushed the door open and walked into the quiet room, which was painfully familiar. Almost nothing had changed. The same furniture — though it had been rearranged — the same pictures on the walls, the same dust and stillness. In the background, she heard the television, on too loud as if trying to fill the asphyxiating silence with sound.
Her mother was sitting in a wicker chair at an oval-shaped mirror, brushing her long, dirty grey hair. It fell dully over her bare shoulders, the pale skin speckled with moles. Naked from the waist up, her dry, shrunken breasts fell over her bellybutton, swinging like pendulums with the movement of her arms.
The Heart Tastes Bitter Page 48