The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  He looked out the window. The ground crew was loading the last few suitcases onto a conveyor belt leading into the cargo hold. You could hear the plane’s rotors revving up. It looked like a perfect day, clear and cloudless. He wondered where Ibrahim would go, what he and Andrea would do when the forensics experts confirmed that the remains they’d found did indeed belong — what a word, he thought — to Aroha. He looked down at his fingernails. They’d touched her, touched a yellowed femur there among the decomposing remains of matted clothes. That was the first time in his life he regretted touching a human bone.

  He had watched Ibrahim approach from the distance. He had a lightness about him, and yet he was solid. An old-school warrior, Guzmán thought, a man who can’t be owned. He tried to remember how many times he’d seen him close to Arthur, dancing in the wings like a restrained shadow. Two, maybe three times. They’d never exchanged more than a few monosyllabic words, greetings infused with mutual distrust. No, not distrust, more like precaution. Two dogs with their tails raised, who sniffed each other’s arse and then chose to back away, each keeping to one side of the road, raising a leg to piss.

  ‘Did Arthur send you?’

  Ibrahim stopped a few metres away. From up close, he was much more fearsome, Guzmán thought. He wondered how long it would have taken to break someone like him in the interrogation room. A tough nut to crack, Bosco would have said. The kind of guy who clenches his teeth while the electrical current is sparking against his balls, but lets out not even a groan — the kind who looks you in the eye and strips you bare with a look that says, you can’t fool me.

  ‘Arthur’s not coming. Not now or ever. He’s dead.’

  Guzmán took the news on board like the good fighter he was. Just a flicker of the eye and a slight tightening of the jaw. The news only partially surprised him. But at this stage, it didn’t matter much anymore. He had the money in the car, enough to be able to stop taking on these shitty jobs.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Ibrahim added, as though trying to tell him that this was their story, that it belonged to Ibrahim and the woman who — against his advice — had gotten out of the car and was watching them from behind the open door.

  Guzmán looked back at her.

  ‘Is that the wife? Did you tell her the girl is buried here?’

  Ibrahim turned his head back, concern etched on his face.

  ‘We don’t know for certain that she’s dead.’

  Guzmán shrugged. He stared at Ibrahim’s scar, the poorly sutured wound that had left him so tragically disfigured. He must have spent months unable to speak, barely able to eat solid food, before it scarred over.

  ‘We don’t know for certain that God doesn’t exist, or that my new penile implant doesn’t work. But you and I know that if there’s one thing for certain, here and now, it’s that writhing beneath our feet are millions of worms that devoured that girl’s dead body. The question is: is it really worth verifying? Do we need to dig her up and see with our own eyes what we already know? Or perhaps it would be better for you to go back to the car and tell the girl’s mother that you didn’t find anything, that her daughter isn’t here, and feed her hope that Aroha could be someplace else.’

  Ibrahim gazed at the dilapidated cabin and looked down at his feet as though the image of a million writhing worms were taking shape before him, just a few centimetres beneath the ground.

  ‘This is no longer any of your business. You got your money and the police are after you. I don’t understand what you’re still doing here. You need to leave.’

  Guzmán didn’t understand it either. It was starting to get dark and his plane was taking off first thing in the morning, with or without him. The smart thing to do would be to hide out in some roadside motel and just wait for morning to come. Get to the airport in just enough time, go through security and get on that plane without showing his face any more than necessary. But there he was, searching for something without knowing what it was.

  ‘I don’t like to leave things unfinished.’ That might not have been what he was actually thinking, or what Ibrahim expected to hear. But that was what he said.

  Not understanding, Ibrahim examined his face, searching for some type of motivation he couldn’t see, fearing a trap. He knew guys like Guzmán. They were all over the world and they’d been around since the beginning of time. They spoke every language. Torturers were all alike, able to slash a little boy’s face with a machete. But he’d never imagined them willing to risk their own hides in order to find the buried body of a little girl.

  ‘I have a shovel in the car. I’ll go get it,’ Guzmán added, reading his thoughts. ‘Let’s get this done with, once and for all.’

  Time has different magnitudes. That was what struck him as the plane finally began moving toward the runway. There he was, in a comfortable seat, his seatbelt fastened, watching the various structures of the airport go by — hangars, control tower, other planes parked on an angle as though at a shopping mall — and at the same time, he could still see the mound of overturned earth piling up on one side of the hole as it got deeper. And another part of him kept seeing the sky in the Atacama, searching for stars as his testicles melted under the heat of a blowtorch. He was sitting on a rock beside a puddle on a dirt road in Santiago de Chile, watching a kite land, wondering why he could never get it to go higher than the antennae and the clothes hung out to dry on people’s roofs. He was kissing the lips of a woman whose name meant little fire: Candela. He was both alive and dead. And all of it was happening there and then, at the same time.

  ‘Who did that to your face?’

  They were taking turns digging. It was Ibrahim’s turn. He’d taken off his shirt and the sweat on his torso mixed in with the mud. He dug, concentrating on what he was doing.

  ‘Life,’ Ibrahim replied, not letting go of the shovel.

  Andrea was just a few steps behind them. There had been no way to convince her to stay in the car. She wanted to be there, to see it with her own eyes. Ibrahim looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Through the sweat in his brows, Guzmán saw on the man’s face a look that he, too, had once possessed.

  ‘Life,’ he murmured, repeating Ibrahim’s words as he stroked the useless skin of his atrophied hand. Life, he’d said, by which he meant Andrea. ‘Here, I’ll take over for now,’ he said, replacing Ibrahim in the ditch.

  Up in the sky there are no plans. Everything is suspended. Clouds, superimposed with varying degrees of density, nurture the absurd feeling that anything is possible and nothing matters. Guzmán felt that even the most burdensome of things lost their weight when he was cloud surfing. Far from the ground, away from the moist earth and the worms bisected by a shovel. It was hard to find a femur when you were up in the clouds at ten thousand metres.

  The pretty flight attendant had just told them they’d reached their cruising altitude and velocity. He thanked her, but still felt like asking them to go higher, and faster.

  The shovel hit something solid, something stuck firmly in the ground. Guzmán knelt down and dug carefully with his fingers, like a sapper, or a paleontologist on the verge of discovering an ancient fossil. He swept aside layer after layer of dirt with his bare hands, until he uncovered the solid yellow chunk of bone. Guzmán knew something about anatomy — a basic understanding he’d picked up through experience. The femur is the longest and strongest bone in the human body, and in women its angle is more pronounced than in men in order to adapt better to the female pelvis.

  Ibrahim lowered the shovel and starting digging with his hands too. Little by little the remains of what had once been Aroha Fernández began to emerge. Inevitably, as they uncovered the hardened remnants of her clothes, Guzmán thought of the cat skeleton he’d come upon a few metres away. The ribcage with just a few ribs, the metacarpals, a tibia, the cranium with its lower jaw detached and full of black earth. People are nothing without the stuff that makes them. Organ
s. Thoughts. Emotions. The rest is just a gruesome costume. The silent vestige of something that once was, but was no longer. He’d always found odd the human need to venerate bones — graves, tombs, cemeteries, religions — when all of those things in fact constituted the overwhelming proof of the one and only truth he’d ever read in the Bible. Dust you are. Unto dust you shall return. Maybe that was why he never went to visit his dead. Because they weren’t really there.

  ‘We’d better not touch anything else. The medical examiner is going to need to identify the body,’ Ibrahim said, wiping the muddy sweat from his face.

  Guzmán contemplated the dark cavities of the eye sockets. Where once there had been eyes there were now clumps of dirt. How much identifying did they need? Who else could it be but Aroha? Regardless, his mission was accomplished. He’d found her.

  ‘What now?’ he asked the air, gazing up at a flock of birds — what were they, swallows? — flapping wildly, feasting on insects in the dusk.

  Ibrahim shrugged, gazing down at the remnants of Aroha’s dress.

  ‘The police will want to know how we found the body. They’ll ask questions and inevitably your name will come up. You should leave, now. I’ll lie to them to buy you a few hours. But they’ll be after you.’

  Andrea had approached the edge of the ditch. She gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed back at her, both forms of darkness engaged in a mutual silent dialogue. The two men got up and left her alone, in the intimacy of her own expression, fading wordlessly away with her daughter’s remains.

  He pictured Aroha’s remains, meticulously cleaned, no dirt or remnants of fabric stuck to them, laid out in the form of a skeleton on the shiny metallic surface of the examiner’s table at the morgue. A puzzle, methodically pieced back together by the examiners — a patella here, a phalanx there. The clothing and jewellery she was wearing when she was buried — gold earrings with a little pearl, an olivine bead necklace, a silver ring — would be stored in an evidence bag. When they were finished, they’d give those belongings back to Andrea, and she could keep them or bury them with the remains that carbon testing and DNA had shown to have a ninety-six percent chance of belonging to Aroha Fernández. The report would never say that it was Aroha; they at least recognised that the bones were not the girl, they had simply belonged to her. They were something she’d had since birth, something beneath her skin that had grown year after year and should have kept growing for a number of years to come. Bones, indeed, are something that belong to us. Something that not even the worms born inside us, born of our own putrefaction, can rob us of. They remain, witness to our struggles for hundreds and thousands of years.

  A ninety-six percent chance. That was a very high chance but it wasn’t a hundred percent. It was as though science wanted to leave a tiny possibility to illusion. If you want to believe, then believe. Up to you, said the report.

  Too many dead bodies, Guzmán thought. He was thinking about his life when the plane landed in Buenos Aires. He heard people applauding from behind the curtain. Here we are, safe and sound. Widespread relief. The new-age type sitting next to him applauded too, like a little kid, though his fellow passenger had said he would have liked to stay up in the air and live there in the clouds. People talk just to talk, in moments of euphoria. But really, they always opt to return to mediocrity. It’s safer to have your feet on the ground. To be another face in the crowd.

  It was raining and the ground crew was on the move, in fluorescent ponchos. Blue and yellow landing lights twinkled, distorted by the water. It must have been cold.

  The pretty flight attendant with a tilted peaked cap had fixed her hair and makeup, adjusted her silk scarf. She was ready for inspection, fresh as a daisy. She approached him with a reassuring smile. But the corners of her mouth were trembling. She wasn’t a good actress.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. It seems there’s a small problem with your documentation. You’ll have to wait for the other passengers to disembark. There are some government officials who just want to verify a few things. Nothing serious, a tedious but essential routine.’

  Guzmán smiled, more than anything to calm the poor girl’s nerves. They shouldn’t make them do that sort of thing, as far as he was concerned. Give bad news, keep everyone calm when the plane is about to crash, demand that, in addition to leg and teeth, they show storybook courage that went against all logic.

  ‘I understand.’

  The ‘government officials’ were in fact federal police agents. They had a warrant for his arrest, issued by Interpol. He didn’t need to see their credentials, though he made them show them to him anyway. Democracy, what an invention, Guzmán thought scornfully. Even guys like him had rights and could demand that the police identify themselves, and it wouldn’t lead to them breaking his jaw, as it surely would have during the days of the military junta.

  ‘Thank you for flying with us, sir. We hope to see you on board with us again soon,’ she said as he walked past her, handcuffed and escorted by the two agents.

  Life was a joke, and it was best to take it that way.

  As they waited outside the terminal for the cruiser to arrive, one of the agents lit a cigarette. Guzmán’s favourite brand.

  ‘Sorry, could you possibly spare me a smoke?’

  EPILOGUE

  On one corner of the table lay the 12 June 2005 morning paper, neatly folded. Martina had set a half-drunk cup of herbal tea — it smelled like chamomile — on top of it. In the end, a judge had decided to go in with both fists swinging: it was all over the press. Entrepreneurs, bankers, a couple of police chiefs and at least one elite athlete had fallen like dominoes. Even more famous people were expected to be arrested. The Cine Club Case — the sensationalist name the press had given it — was going to be the soap opera of the summer.

  Martina had bags under her eyes and had lost weight, but her eyes were clear. She didn’t take out her notebook and instead sat with it in her lap, hands folded on top as if forcing herself not to open it.

  ‘I suppose I owe you an apology.’

  Eduardo looked at her without responding. Perhaps she expected him to cut in, but his silence forced her to continue.

  ‘Mr Who stole the file with all your personal information. It took me a little while to realise it, and when I did, I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I was so mortified that I couldn’t get over my shame. They’re charging me with negligence, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst thing is that now everybody knows I pay for sex.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s anyone’s business but your own,’ Eduardo said. He really meant it. No one had the right to judge other people’s means of combatting loneliness.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ the psychiatrist asked.

  Eduardo didn’t know. He felt empty — emptier than he ever had. Like the most insignificant part of a story in which all the other players had used his pain to staunch their wounds. When it all died down, when the storm passed, he’d still be sitting at the foot of his bed, listening to his father’s records, staring out his apartment window at the playground across the street, with nothing to fill his empty hours.

  ‘Maybe I’ll go back to painting things that interest me — faces of anonymous people, feelings floating on a landscape. Or maybe I’ll just hole up at home. Honestly, I don’t really know.’

  ‘What about your landlady’s offer? If I recall correctly, she invited you to leave Madrid with her and her daughter. Maybe it would be easier to start afresh someplace new.’

  Eduardo saw her fingers attempting to reach out and touch his hand. To console him. He pulled his hand away and tucked it under his crossed arms, negating that possibility.

  ‘That’s no longer an option.’ Truthfully, it never had been.

  Eduardo looked up. Yesterday was now today. It was ten thirty-five. His last chance had left an hour and thirty-five minutes ago. Time crossed his mind and leaked out through the
pores in his skin. He’d heard them walk out of the apartment, put down their suitcases, lock the door. Sara had been chattering breathlessly, excited at the idea of their trip. Graciela wasn’t saying a word. She was probably looking at Eduardo’s door hoping to see him appear with a backpack and a confident smile on his lips. But he didn’t even have the courage to go out and say goodbye. He stood there behind the closed door, watching them walk down the stairs through the peephole. Until there was nothing there but silence.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  Martina didn’t show any opposition. In fact, she opened the top drawer of her desk and took two cigarettes out of a case. She held one out to him and lit her own, eyes fixed on the hot ash.

  ‘I’m going to discharge you. It doesn’t make sense for you to keep coming every month.’

  Suddenly Eduardo felt the pressing need to keep sitting there beside her. Martina was the only real thing he had left — her and his father’s records. He realised with dismay that, outside of that room, there was no longer a single person who needed him.

  ‘I’m still having nightmares. Though they’re less frequent.’

  Martina smoothed her hair and tapped her cigarette into an ashtray full of paper clips.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, her expression distracted by something outside the window.

  You’re no longer my problem, is what she meant.

  ‘What do you think that means?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The fact that I don’t have as many nightmares anymore. Maybe your theory of forgiveness works. Maybe Mr Who freed me from that subconscious burden. Don’t you think?’

  No. Of course she didn’t.

  ‘It’s possible. Either way, at least it’s all over.’ Martina slowly turned her head to check the time on the clock behind her. Then she looked around, uncomfortable, as though searching for someone else. Something was distracting her.