Cemetery of Swallows

by Mallock;

  Manuel paused a moment to think before concluding his story.

  “I have to tell you one last thing, Superintendent.”

  Mallock was tempted to remind him of his request not to call him “Superintendent,” but changed his mind. On reflection, it wasn’t a good idea to ask a guy who was half-crazy and probably a murderer to call by his first name the cop who was assigned to pick him up. For the moment, “Superintendent” would do just fine.

  “In fact, I’m happy that this Darbier, if that’s his real name, didn’t die immediately,” Manuel went on. “He had to see his death approaching. It’s terrible, but that makes me happy. Like the certainty that he suffered during his last moments. I can’t stop replaying in my head the image of his blood in the dust, of his fingers torn off, of his brains on the ground and the urine that was leaking out between his legs. I can’t help thinking with joy about his cries of rage, his gurgling with pain, at the same time that I hate myself for having taken a life. You’re going to think I’m sick, Amédée, and you’re probably right, but for me his miserable death agony was and remains something euphoric, at the same time exciting and calming, a moment of deliverance, not to say bliss.”

  Mallock, embarrassed by this admission, asked an entirely different question:

  “Weren’t you ever afraid?”

  “No, never. But there’s nothing unusual about that; I was born like that. There’s only one thing that scares me, and that’s the dark. Put me in a forest at night and you’ll transform me into a frightened little boy. I feel there’s a presence, something terrible. My mother and Julie will tell you. They constantly explained to me that at night there were exactly the same number of people and objects in a room as in the daytime. They went so far as to count them. But I was convinced that there was at least one thing more, more than during the day, and that . . . thing always terrified me. During this whole business, nothing has frightened me, neither the unknown, nor poverty, nor death. The day on which I killed Darbier will remain the greatest day of my life, as important as the birth of my child. It’s a kind of foundational act for me, even though I still don’t know why.”

  And then, as if all this still wasn’t complicated enough, he felt obliged to add:

  “You know that he seemed to recognize me, too, when I attacked him?”

  It was at this point that Ramón and Jiménez knocked on the door to the room. It was 4 P.M. Outside, heavy clouds were darkening the city. An initial grumbling resounded like a warning.

  The two policemen seemed delighted to see the now famous Gemoni. Mallock even wondered whether they were going to ask for his autograph. If Ramón asked for one for each of his children, they weren’t going to get out of there any time soon. Proving that they wanted to stay a while, they went out again to bring three plastic chairs back to the room. Ramón Double-cream arranged the chairs in a circle in front of Manu’s bed. Mallock sat on the chair in the middle, with Ramón on his left and Jiménez on his right.

  It was Amédée who opened the discussion by addressing himself to Manu:

  “This is Commander Juan Luis Jiménez and his assistant, el capitán Ramón Cabral. They have served as my guides on the island ever since I arrived here. If I have asked them to come here, it’s because the commander says he has interesting revelations to make regarding . . . ”

  But Mallock didn’t have time to finish his sentence. Manu had suddenly opened his eyes wide on seeing Jiménez. At the same moment, a dull explosion had resounded in Mallock’s right ear. When he turned around, he saw Jiménez pointing an automatic at him. Out of the smoke emerged the silence that had been ended by the gunshot.

  The storm broke and a lightning bolt illuminated the room. Instinctively, Mallock turned toward Ramón.

  Double-cream was still sitting on his chair, his arms on the armrests. The bullet had penetrated his left ear, leaving a circular hole. His brains, which had splattered on the wall, were slowly running down toward the floor, licking the whitish paint on the partition.

  For Mallock, it was clear. If he said nothing, if he did nothing, in a few seconds he and Manu would be dead as well. Following the lightning bolt, a first thunderclap, enormous and belligerent, exploded over the city. To gain time, Amédée held his open hands out to Jiménez, asking him:

  “Why, comandante? Before you shoot, tell me, between policemen, why?”

  Jiménez’s hands were trembling. His eyes were wet and his jaw clenched. For Mallock, this was clear, too: he was acting on orders. And what he had had to do was far from easy for him.

  “Why did you kill Ramón?”

  “Ramón is collateral damage.”

  Mallock doubted that. He’d shot him first because he was the only one in the room who was armed.

  “Now I have to kill you two as well, both of you, I’m sorry . . . ”

  Another lightning bolt. Mallock, who no longer had any hope, lowered his arms and looked sadly at Manu. The grumbling of the thunder, colossal, shook the windowpanes.

  “I’m sorry,” Jiménez repeated, as he raised his automatic and aimed it at Mallock’s head.

  A third lightning bolt. Amédée started to say:

  “Jiménez, I understand. Sometimes there are things in life that the meaning of the . . . ”

  Then his arm shot forward as if to slap the air. His hand closed on the silencer, he twisted his wrist, and two seconds later Amédée was holding the gun and pointing it at Jiménez.

  As he hoped, the third thunderclap had been even more violent. By counting twenty seconds, twenty syllables, he’d acted at the right time. In his heart of hearts, he thanked his friend Gilles Guédrout, who had made him repeat a hundred times the twisting motion of the wrist after having grabbed the barrel.

  Then he called: “Guard!”

  When the guards entered, they were stupefied.

  Was that because they saw Ramón with a bullet in his head? Or because they didn’t see Mallock and Manu in the same condition? Did they know what their comandante intended to do? Or did they have nothing to do with this attack?

  Still more questions, Mallock thought, the answers to which he would not have for a long time, if ever. Didn’t matter. Hardly had the guards come into the room, after three seconds of hesitation, before they pointed their weapons at Jiménez and put him under arrest.

  When he thought about it, Mallock realized that he already had his answer.

  They would have pointed their guns at him if they hadn’t known what was going on. He was the only one who was armed, and he was a foreigner to boot. If they hadn’t known otherwise, they would therefore have concluded that it was he, and not Jiménez, who had just shot Ramón. The soldiers in this country, as in many banana republics, knew the smell of putsches and failed assassinations. Vae victis! Jiménez, by failing, had instantly found himself alone.

  Mallock had just enough time to ask him one question before he was taken away.

  “Why, Jiménez? Was it to avenge Darbier?”

  “No, para que no hable!”

  “Who? And so he wouldn’t talk about what?”

  But Mallock didn’t have a chance to hear the reply. So that Jimenez himself didn’t talk in his turn, the guards took him away roughly and without waiting.

  During the whole attack, Manu had remained immobile in his bed.

  “Thanks, Amédée. My God, I really think I owe you my life.”

  Mallock smiled at him. Julie’s brother had been so shaken that for the first time in his life he’d finally been able to say tu to him!

  10.

  Cabarete, Thursday, the Second Part of the Evening

  Water was starting to fall out of the sky as Mallock was returning to Cabarete. He had seldom seen such a downpour. It was a compact mass of large, heavy raindrops. Vertical rivers that greedily rushed onto the aridity of the soil. The landscape, which had been dull and matte, became shining, c
olors became vivid and the greens became fluorescent. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with such a deluge, and the guagua in which he was riding had to slow and almost stop while waiting for the rain to let up. It was almost 8 P.M. when Mallock arrived in front of the Blue Paradise.

  Shocked by the attempted killing and Ramón’s death, Mallock had forgotten his rendezvous with Juan Antonio Servantes. The latter was waiting with a glass and a bottle of single malt in front of him. He must have come directly from his office, and hadn’t changed clothes.

  “Good evening, Commander. Would you like to go upstairs and freshen up a bit in your room or should we go right away? I know a very good little restaurant that I’d like to show you.”

  Mallock decided it was pointless to tell him what had happened in Manuel’s hospital room.

  “Give me five minutes to take a shower and I’ll be right back.”

  Of course, a quarter of an hour later, they dropped anchor in the same harbor where Jean-Daniel had taken him the day before. But Amédée pretended to be astonished. Sometimes he acted in an almost civilized way, and was capable of the required minimum of hypocrisy.

  Juan Antonio Servantes waited until the waiter had taken their order before leaning toward Mallock:

  “I still don’t know whether what I’m going to say will be of any use to you. And in fact, telling you this could put me in a difficult situation if you were indiscreet . . . ”

  Servantes was beating around the bush. He was waiting for a response or a sign of encouragement. But Mallock knew only too well the virtues of silence. He endured three minutes of embarrassment and questioning looks without flinching.

  The young diplomat finally cracked:

  “Can I count on your total discretion?”

  “Everything depends on what you’ve got to tell me,” Mallock said, resolved not to force a revelation. “I can’t promise anything before knowing what it’s about. It’s up to you to decide.”

  The bureaucrat was an intelligent young man: he understood that Mallock’s very correctness, his refusal to make an unconditional promise to keep quiet, was the best guarantee of his possible silence. He lit a cigarillo, drank a sip of red wine, and settled back in his chair.

  “You’re a man of considerable experience, and I’m sure my physical appearance struck you as odd, associated with a name that is so . . . Mediterranean.”

  No sign of denial on Mallock’s part.

  Servantes went on:

  “You must also know that many former German military men, and especially the Nazis, took refuge in various countries in Latin America, forming small groups who regretted or yearned nostalgically for the Third Reich. You don’t have to believe me, but my father belonged to the first category. He’d been mistaken about the notion of the Fatherland and about his Führer’s true nature. As a soldier, he’d learned to obey and had taken longer than others to become aware of what he’d been asked to do. That’s not an excuse, but it is the beginning of an explanation. Today, it’s very easy to judge and condemn a whole nation. Germans are no better or worse than the other peoples that vilify them. However that may be, to come back to my father, he asked for no favors, for no leniency, and he never really tried to conceal himself. Sometimes it even seemed that he wanted to be captured, in order to atone, no doubt . . . ”

  Juan Antonio Servantes hung his head.

  “Not seeing punishment coming, he finally hanged himself shortly after my birth. My mother told me that he refused to be happy, and that my presence was too great a pleasure for him, a blessing he didn’t deserve. In fact, I’d become an unbearable happiness for him.”

  He waited a few seconds for his sorrow to subside and then added:

  “To sum up, he hanged himself because of me.”

  The young man choked up. To give himself time to recover, he filled the superintendent’s glass and then his own. Although, or rather because, he was innocent, living was not easy. Juan Antonio Servantes was suffering and his wound was deep. The waiter came with two steaming plates of spiny lobster.

  “Begin right away. It’s better hot,” Juan advised.

  Mallock looked at the young man and asked frankly:

  “This Darbier whom Manu killed . . . Did you know him?”

  The diplomat smiled painfully.

  “Not personally, but Tobias Darbier was a legend among the people of the ‘exiled,’ as my mother called us. In fact, ‘legend’ isn’t the right word, I should rather say ‘taboo.’ Every time I asked her what the man had done that prevented any of his former companions from trying to take advantage of his success, my mother waved her hand, as if to tell me that there was nothing to know and that I had to stop asking questions about the guy.”

  Juan waved his wrist in front of him, imitating his late mother’s movement of denial.

  “I think no one knew the whole truth. The man was surrounded by rumors and inspired fear. For us children, he’d become something frightening, the villain, the devil, the very face of fear and the dark. He was ‘the incarnation of the bogey-man in fairy tales.’ I think he also bore all our little world’s guilt, he was our collective bad conscience. In any case, he was a monster, not a man!”

  Mallock thought of Manu again. He, too, had emphasized this point by speaking of an ogre.

  “In Sosúa,” the young diplomat continued, “there was a group of Ashkenazi Jews who had been living there since the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime. Three or four years ago, I questioned members of one of these families. The little community was convinced that Darbier was a war criminal. There were rumors, confidences, reported declarations–there was hardly any doubt. But they didn’t have enough proof to inform the Israeli authorities. And then, they were terrified. If there was a leak, if it was learned that they had accused Darbier, they were risking the worst. Rumors of torture were common on the island. It would be suicidal to attack a man who governed the territory where they lived, and who had made them rich. Because business is business, and they had dealings with him.”

  “And your mother never told you anything more explicit about Darbier, about what he was supposed to have done?”

  “She did. And that’s what I’ve come to tell you.”

  Juan Servantes sat up straight. Took a deep breath. Mallock recognized the importance these admissions had for the young man.

  “My mother was really shocked when Tobias Darbier regained favor and then power in l996, for the third time, alongside Balaguer. In fact, it made her crazy with rage. According to her, he had gone beyond all limits of barbarity. And even if she refused to tell me more precisely, she finally fed me a few bits of information in the form of anathemas against the ogre. It was so violent and so astonishing, especially coming from her, that I still recall the exact words she used. She screamed at me that the mere existence of that man on Earth was ‘an insult to God,’ his coming into the world ‘a blasphemy,’ and his incredible survival ‘the devil’s doing.’ Caught up in her surge of hatred, she also told me something I hadn’t heard before: the legend of his birth.”

  Juan leaned toward Mallock and murmured:

  “The scars this accursed Tobias had on his skull are supposed to have been made by his mother’s teeth when he was born. It’s said that she gave birth to him through her mouth.”

  Amédée concealed his uneasiness by picking up his glass. He drank its content in little sips, while the young diplomat continued his story:

  “The doctors are supposed to have pried apart and disjointed the poor woman’s jaws in order to let the baby emerge. It’s absurd, but most people around here believe it. And then my poor mother added that the man who succeeded in cleansing the earth of his presence would have ‘a place in heaven for all eternity, alongside the Lord.’ Now, my mother was very religious, very orthodox in her Catholicism, if I dare say so. I was stupefied to hear her assure me that she would find it acceptable that some
one who had committed a murder be admitted to heaven. It was that statement, more than all the rest, that really affected me. And that is perhaps also why, twelve years later, I am so concerned about Manuel.”

  He fell silent and sat back in his chair to let the waiter fill their glasses again. He waited until the waiter had left to continue:

  “I’m not a practicing Catholic, and hardly even a believer, but I did in fact detect a kind of . . . saintliness in Manuel. He has an extraordinary good will toward the people and things around him, and then there is this acceptance of his destiny. Either he is completely mad or . . . Anyway, I’m really no longer sure what to think. Do you believe in God, Commander?”

  “No, nor in the devil. God forbid. Come on, let’s eat.”

  They both attacked the lobsters. But they were already completely cold.

  Mallock returned to his hotel around midnight. The rain had stopped. He decided to go back to the beach to try to fight off a new fit of sadness. In the distance, at the exit from the bay, he could see white lines in the dark, the last ocean waves still playing with the coral reef, pink barriers for baby waves.

  The superintendent stretched out on the sand. He imagined himself digging into the sand with his face and his webbed feet in order to give birth to his pains there. So many little soft eggs whose inhabitants would soon wriggle free from the sand and run off to the sea.