The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  ‘Hello, mother.’

  The old woman stopped pulling the brush through her tangles and stared at Olga in the mirror. Her dim, faded eyes flickered for an instant beneath her lashes, and then she began brushing her hair again, with determination. As though fourteen years had not passed. Olga walked to her and took the brush from her hands, taking her place like when she was a girl and her mother explained the way to do it so she didn’t yank her hair. Olga gazed at her mother in the reflection. They looked too similar to have such different lives. Bound by an invisible tie. She belonged in that darkness, that smell, that mesmerising sadness where flies hovered over a basket of half-rotten fruit and her mother’s old lovers posed for her in a portrait gallery above the chest of drawers. A gallery of defeats and illusions, failed escapes and promises that none of them had kept. And among them, in one corner, was Teo.

  ‘You can’t stay. You’re not welcome here.’

  Olga didn’t have the strength to face up to her and tell her the whole truth. Truth was resentment that turned against her. Her mother had accused her of having spoiled her chance at happiness with the only man that had ever loved her. But she was fooling herself. Teo had never loved anyone but himself.

  On the television, they were talking about Arthur. Dead bodies were springing up like poppies along a wheat field. Like red stains. A provincial court judge had opened an investigation that tied the deaths of Gloria and her husband to that of Arthur. The case was under sub judice rule, but press leaks hinted at a major scandal that had all the ingredients of a thriller: underage prostitution, drugs, porn flicks, and murder.

  ‘I just need a couple of days to get my thoughts straight. Then I’ll leave and you’ll never hear from me again.’

  She went up to her old room and found a bare mattress, no sheets or pillow. The desk was covered in dust, and on opening a drawer she found a rat had used her school notebooks as its nest. There were cobwebs everywhere, enshrouding the room. No one had been in there since she’d left. She opened her suitcase and stared down at the portfolio tucked between her blouses. After finding out about Gloria’s suicide, Eduardo had refused to see her, or speak to her once Who let her go. Nor had he accepted the rest of the money he was owed for the commission.

  One after the other, Olga thumbtacked the sketches to the wall and then sat on the edge of the bed to contemplate them. They created a unique sequence: in each successive drawing the lines grew stronger and more assured until finally they became something solid, as if each successive sketch peeled off another layer of the onion in order to reveal its core. And there at the centre, Eduardo had stopped. As if he’d been unable to take it any further. It was like the autopsy of a cadaver, but it made more sense now. She’d seen the pictures of Arthur on TV, flayed and mutilated in the most horrific way. But what had most caught her attention was the killers’ determination to disfigure his face, as if trying to erase his existence, destroy the tangle of experiences and emotions that were superimposed in Eduardo’s work. Without those eyes staring out darkly, without that hard mouth and slightly crooked nose, Arthur was nothing.

  Her mother walked in without knocking. The door wasn’t locked. She stepped in and her eyes went straight to the sketches on the wall. She glanced at them, shocked because she’d never seen them before. Her mother looked displeased. She didn’t like them, or perhaps she didn’t like that they were hanging on the wall. Seeing Olga there, sitting on the edge of the bed with her suitcase still packed, knees pressed tightly together, hands held to her stomach, she looked like a schoolgirl. Perhaps her mother felt a slight tremor of guilt, nostalgia, and even love. But if so, it was buried too deep to reach the surface.

  ‘What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into?’ she asked suspiciously. What kind of trouble have you gotten me into, was what she meant.

  Olga glanced up, giving her mother a look of pity. Sometimes, there are people you want to love and just can’t figure out how. With so many accumulated misunderstandings you end up losing the way, and it’s impossible to get back on track.

  ‘There are two police officers downstairs, asking for you.’

  Olga inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with air, and nodded. Sometimes all you can do is accept things the way they are because they can’t be any other way. Everything else is just pie in the sky. An illusion. Realising that made her feel light-hearted for the first time in a very long time. She was liberated by the idea of no longer fighting the impossible. And so Olga walked down the stairs free of the weight on her shoulders, and greeted the policemen.

  They wanted to ask about Gloria and Ian’s murders. They’d found the shredded remains of Arthur’s portrait and knew she had been the intermediary between Eduardo and the divorced couple. She wasn’t being accused of anything, one of them took pains to stress, they knew she was innocent.

  Olga smiled sadly. Innocent. Free of blame, blessed as a newborn baby. She lifted her head and saw her mother at the foot of the stairs in her nightgown, her hair wet, wearing black socks, arms crossed over her chest. She was veiled in a soft darkness, staring at her in silence. A silence full of reproach and contempt. It was inevitable.

  When Who had taken her to an abandoned house, Olga’d thought he was planning to kill her. But he didn’t do it straightaway. Instead, he locked her up in a room for two days and two nights. She thought he was going to leave her there to die of hunger and thirst. Maybe, she thought during those two long nights, Mr Who was trying to make her lose her mind.

  Olga spent all that time sitting in the exact same position, elbows on her bent knees, staring at the door, alert to any sound or the slightest change in the light filtering in beneath it. At first, she was so terrified she couldn’t think or sleep. But slowly, she started to remember things long forgotten, brief instances that hadn’t been that important to begin with but now popped into her head and made her smile, or laugh out loud, or cry the calm tears of nostalgia, or the wracking tears of desperation. As if the darkness forced her to see better, she was able to see Teo clearly, as though he — or his ghost — were sitting right in front of her, reproaching her with that condescending look he had given her for what she’d done. And it made her furious. Because that ghost, who used to jiggle the arm of his metal-framed glasses back and forth in his fingers, didn’t feel guilty at all, and in fact he was accusing her.

  On the morning of the third day, she heard the sound of car tyres braking outside the gate. Stunned and petrified, Olga crawled to the door to peek through a crack.

  She could make out the silhouette of a woman but couldn’t see her clearly through the car’s dusty windshield. The woman lowered the window a couple of centimetres and looked out with a pair of brown, almond-shaped eyes that seemed to stare at her, to know that she was there peeking out the crack in the door. Olga withdrew, forced back by the intensity of the woman’s gaze. She heard the car door open and the crunch of footsteps on the dusty ground, heard the rusty gate open and the metallic clink of the chain lock banging against the door as it closed. The door opened and light streamed in, blinding Olga.

  It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust.

  ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to hurt you. My name is Mei.’ She held out a hand, indicating that Olga should come with her.

  Olga followed her to the car unsteadily, using her hand as a visor against the brightness of the sun.

  Mei opened a bottle of water and offered it to her with a look somewhere between compassion and troubled curiosity. Olga drank like a desperate camel. Water dribbled down her neck leaving streaks through the grime on her skin from the two days and nights of sleeping on the floor of that pigsty.

  ‘Slowly.’ Mei’s voice was beautiful, peaceful.

  Olga drank more slowly. Then she accepted the sandwich that the girl offered her, breaking it into tiny bits and swallowing them with difficulty. Olga ate, though she wasn’t hungry. Her stomach had shrunk. As she chewed the ham
sandwich, she stared at Mei, whose eyes were on the road, occasionally giving her a quick sidelong glance as she drove. They were on the road back to Madrid.

  ‘What are you going to do with me now?’ she asked those eyes, which were frowning — Mei wrapped up in her own thoughts.

  ‘Nothing,’ the girl replied. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all over.’

  Olga gazed at the unfamiliar hand and felt calmer. She believed her.

  ‘Get some rest,’ she said.

  Olga tried to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. Her heart was pounding. She felt a bit calmer — though she didn’t know why — when they got to the suburbs of Madrid. Until she realised that the streets were becoming more familiar. Mei was taking her home.

  When she stopped the car at her front door and asked her to get out, Olga hesitated, disconcerted. The girl who’d done nothing but look at her with a sort of curious tenderness now gave her a wide smile of encouragement.

  ‘Good luck. Now you’re going to have to pick up the pieces of your life and make something new of it.’

  Olga looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Where’s Mr Who?’

  The girl stroked Olga’s cheek affectionately.

  ‘No one can hurt him now.’

  Mei pulled away and drove down the street, swallowed up by the Madrid traffic in no time at all.

  Olga didn’t see her crying.

  Three hours earlier, Mei was already dead. The men surrounding her sat smoking, ignoring her, passing butts from which to light fresh cigarettes. On the dirty glass table sat beer cans, lines of coke, and leftover pizza, as well as an overflowing ashtray. Chang’s hand on her shoulder held her firmly down in a chair.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart, try it,’ he said, pointing to the white powder on the table. But Mei refused. Nor did she voluntarily submit to being groped by that old man, who squeezed one of her breasts so hard she thought he might tear it off.

  ‘Is she a virgin?’ asked one of the men there.

  Chang burst out laughing.

  ‘Are you a virgin, Mei? Do you have at least one orifice intact?’

  The men ogled her greedily. They had bought her, the way you buy a head of cattle. She could do nothing but give in to their filthy mouths, their impertinent hands, which they could hardly contain. They would use her the way they’d used other of Chang’s workers, and then they’d take her to a brothel in some random city, where she would be forced to prostitute herself at all hours of the day and night until she was beyond exhausted. And when she was no longer any use to them, she’d finish out her days sickly and consumptive, rummaging through the rubbish in alleyways to survive.

  She wasn’t planning to let that happen. Mei had decided that, at the first opportunity that arose, she would kill herself. And she felt a mixture of fear and intense sadness at the prospect of dying when she was just twenty-one, now that she’d finally found the reason for her journey in this life. She’d fallen in love with the only man for her; he was her destiny. But it was all going to be over before it began, and that seemed too cruel. Why had she been given the gift of meeting him if she couldn’t enjoy the benefit of his company? Why did people like Chang exist in this world? What blows must life have dealt that man for him to end up such a callous monster?

  They dragged her to the sofa and pushed her down, trying to force her to undress. When she would not do it herself, they beat her and tore her dress off. Her hands tried frantically to cover her breasts and crotch from the eyes that bored into her as they laughed. She felt as if the outside world carried on unchanged, but she was trapped hopelessly in that one instant with no way out. She tried to find refuge in her memory, in the few moments she’d been truly happy, free. She thought of Who’s eyes, his smile, his promises. She thought of one day in the country, the sun on her face, the scent of fresh grass swept by a light mist that stuck her clothes to her skin and plastered her bangs onto her forehead. She remembered Who’s hands, holding her face between his fingers in awe. And she closed her eyes.

  The first thing Mr Who noticed when he walked into the room was the noxious air. The guy posted at the door had greeted him with a giggle, as though envious. ‘They’re having a good old time in there, the bastards. You’re lucky Chang confers these favours on you.’ Mr Who could have ripped that trained-poodle smile right off his face, kicked it out of him. He really could have.

  It smelled of sour perspiration, and the sweaty backs of half-a-dozen men formed a semi-circle around the sofa. Through that wall of flesh he caught a glimpse of the pale skin of a woman, and one pink nipple. His stomach clenched.

  ‘Ah, finally, the perfect lover has arrived.’ Chang was drugged up, as were the others. His face was red, his eyes dilated. He was naked from the waist up, and the tattoo of a dragon with a serpent in its talons covered the whole of his chest and part of his stomach. His fly was down.

  ‘Come, come, star pupil. This way,’ he urged, laughing, patting his back and pushing him toward the sofa. ‘We want a live show. We want you to teach us to make love. Isn’t that what you tell your customers you’ll do? Gentlemen, you should know that my boy here never simply fucks! No, no — he makes art, with his privileged cock.’

  Who felt himself die a thousand times over, felt his body being dismembered, his brain exploding, seeing Mei’s body there. She was a desolate wilderness, a prairie whose beautiful flowers had been mercilessly trampled. She turned to hide her face in shame against the sofa’s leather back. It was like she was dead.

  ‘What have you done?’ Who whispered, giving Chang a look of pure hatred, unable to stop his hand from trembling as he touched Mei’s shoulder, which was covered in scratches.

  The old man gave the faint smile of a sick old faun.

  ‘Nothing yet, just smacked her around a little, just warming up. We were waiting for you.’ He looked maliciously at Who. ‘Did you really think you could fool me? I know everything, boy. I know you’ve been saving up to buy two passports, and that one of them was for this little whore. I also know you’ve been fucking her behind my back — and I could overlook that, but not you falling in love with her and trying to leave me. You can’t leave until I say so; you’re my best investment — my cock of gold! And so I’m going to teach you a lesson that you won’t forget the next time you get an idea like that in your head. You’re going to fuck this little whore for us, and then I’m going to leave her in a brothel where they’ll make her wish she was never born.’

  Who felt as though an earthquake were rocking the building, the roof caving in on the room, the floor opening under his feet. After hearing Chang’s words and seeing Mei hide her face in shame, he had only one idea in his head, pounding like a hammer: he was going to rip Chang’s head off.

  He felt the blows landing on him as they tried to stop him, but he didn’t feel any pain; it was as if they were hitting a wet sack of flour. He had his prey, had a good hold on Chang’s head, and wasn’t letting go, clenching his teeth with rage. He wanted to rip Chang’s eyes out of their sockets and see them explode. Wanted to stomp on them like they were venomous snake eggs. Then he felt a jab in his side and saw the bouncer from the door, no longer smiling but holding a long, thin knife that luckily he had not plunged into Who up to the hilt. Still, it was enough to make Who momentarily let go of Chang, who fell to his knees, red as a tomato and coughing, his windpipe collapsed.

  Without thinking, Who leapt on the man with the knife, unmindful of the danger. He didn’t care about anything or anyone. His only desire was to destroy everything in his path. Nobody can fight off suicidal determination, no matter how much they’re being paid. Nothing can defeat that sort of desperation. Who snatched the blade off the hired goon and rammed it into his shoulder, all of his weight thrusting into the handle. The man let out a yowl and his arm fell to his side, hanging lifeless. Mr Who then yanked out the blade and turned to the others, daring them to attack. They held back. Vic
tory would cost them too much, for now. If he wanted the little whore, he could have her. The two of them wouldn’t make it far, and the men could wait to settle their score. One after the other, they filed out of the room. The last two took the wounded bouncer with them. Mr Who knew that within five minutes Chang’s men in the restaurant would come for him. He shot Chang — still on the floor — a savage look. He had leaned onto one elbow and was vomiting blood and alcohol. Without thinking, Who rammed the blade into Chang’s neck with the force of all the offenses he’d ever suffered, the lies and disappointments he’d been subjected to for years, when he’d actually thought of Chang as his true father, someone he admired. Mr Who had no compassion for that man.

  He pulled a blanket off the sofa and used it to cover Mei, who was paralysed by fear, and stared at him as though she didn’t recognise him. He didn’t waste any time on explanations.

  ‘The fire escape,’ he said, rushing to open the window.

  They’d gotten far enough away from Madrid to feel safe. His wound did not look good. He needed to get it stitched up, but couldn’t think about that now. He couldn’t think about anything. He had to pull the car over on the shoulder. His hands were trembling, he felt as if he’d just come out of a trance, and his nerves were shot. They were beside a field. Green shoots rose up, leaning toward the sun, and the poppies were elbowing their way in like spots of colour, there to break up the monotony. Whizzing sprinklers cartwheeled, shooting spirals of water that sprayed the car. He could hear a dog barking in the distance and saw the silhouette of a man bent over a ditch. Beyond that was nothing but open sky. Life goes from one moment to the next without pause, with no way to stop.

  ‘Did they hurt you?’ Who asked Mei.

  She gave a quick shake of her head to say ‘no’ as she leaned over and lifted his shirt to inspect the wound. Relieved, she said it wasn’t grave, as though she were some sort of expert. In fact it was. Her eyes were sad, humiliated. What hurt her most was her inability to comprehend human evil.