Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Anyway,” Eddie Alvarez went on, after considering the matter for a while, “all of that was later, when things changed and she decided to collect on her outstanding debts. . . . And listen, when she got out of El Puerto de Santa María, I figure all she was thinking about was disappearing from the world. I don’t think she was ever ambitious, or a dreamer. . . . I’ll wager she was never even truly vengeful. She just wanted to stay alive, that’s all. Thing is, sometimes luck, after slapping you around for a while, decides to smile on you.”

  A group of men and women from Gibraltar occupied a neighboring table. Alvarez knew them, and he went over to say hello. That gave me the opportunity to study him from some remove: the obsequious way he smiled, shook hands, listened—like a man listening for clues to what he ought to say. A survivor, I told myself. The kind of slimy son of a bitch who survives, as another Eddie had described him—in this case Eddie Campello, also from Gibraltar, an old friend of mine and publisher of the local weekly Vox. “Doesn’t even have the balls to double-cross you, our friend,” said Campello when I asked about the relationship between the lawyer and Teresa Mendoza. “What happened at Punta Castor was Cañabota and that sergeant from the Guardia Civil—Alvarez wasn’t involved. He just pocketed the Gallego’s money, and money didn’t mean shit to that woman. The fact that she rescued that asshole and put him to work for her again is proof of that.”

  “And let me tell you”—Eddie Alvarez was back at our table—“I’d say that the Mexicana is still not vengeful. She’s more . . . I don’t know. Maybe just practical, you see? . . . In her world, you don’t leave loose ends.”

  Then he told me something interesting. “When they threw her into El Puerto, I went to the house that she and the Gallego had in Palmones, to liquidate everything and close it up. And you know what? She had gone to sea that night like so many other times, not knowing that it would be the last time. But she had everything all in order, in boxes, drawers, everything in its place. Even in the closets. That house could have passed an army inspection.

  “More than cold-blooded calculation, ambition, or thirst for revenge”—Alvarez nodded, looking at me as though the drawers and boxes and closets explained everything—“I think it was a sense of symmetry.”

  She finished sweeping the wooden walkway, poured herself half a glass of tequila and filled the rest with orange juice, and then went to smoke a cigarette out on the end of the walk, shoeless, her feet half buried in the warm sand. The sun was still low, and its diagonal rays covered the beach with shadows from each wave or footprint, making the sandy expanse look like a landscape on the moon. Between the kiosk and the shoreline everything was clean and neat, awaiting the swimmers who would begin to arrive at mid-morning: two lounge chairs under each umbrella, carefully aligned by Teresa, with their blue-and-white-striped cushions shaken out and straightened. The air was calm, the sea was quiet, the water at the shore silent, and the early-morning sun shimmered with metallic orange splendor between the black silhouettes of the few passersby: retirees on their morning walks; a young couple with a dog; a solitary man looking out at the ocean, a fishing pole stuck into the sand beside him. And down toward the end of the beach and the orange glow, toward the east, behind the pines and the palm trees and the magnolias, Marbella, with the red-tile rooftops of its villas and its concrete-and-glass towers rising in the golden haze.

  She savored her cigarette, undone and rerolled, as usual, with a little hashish. Tony, the manager of the stall, didn’t like her to smoke anything but tobacco when he was around, but at this hour Tony hadn’t arrived and the swimmers would be a while yet—it was the first few days of the season—so she could smoke in peace. And that tequila with orange juice, or vice versa, was terrific. She’d been here since eight this morning—coffee, no sugar, a piece of bread with olive oil, a donut—setting out the lounge chairs, sweeping the walkway, straightening tables and chairs, and ahead of her she still had a day of work identical to yesterday’s and the day before’s: dirty glasses behind the counter, and at the bar and the tables lemon slushes, juices, iced coffees, Cuba libres, mineral waters, her head splitting and her shirt drenched with sweat, under the palm-thatch roof the sun filtered through. The heavy, humid atmosphere reminded her of Altata in the summer, but with more people and more smell of suntan lotion.

  And she had to be alert, too, to the demands of the customers: I ordered this with no ice, Listen, hey, I ordered this with lemon and ice, Don’t tell me you don’t have any Fanta, You gave it to me sparkling and I ordered it still. Chíngale. These fucking Spaniards and gringos summering here with their flowered shorts and red greasy skins and sunglasses, their screaming kids and their bodies spilling out of their bathing suits and T-shirts and pareos—they were much worse, much more self-centered and inconsiderate, than the customers that frequented Dris Larbi’s puti-clubs. Teresa spent twelve hours a day with these people, back and forth, with no time even to sit down for ten minutes, the recently healed fracture in her arm aching from the weight of the drink-laden tray, her hair in two braids and a kerchief around her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes. And always with Tony watching her suspiciously.

  But it wasn’t all bad. There was that period in the morning when she’d finished straightening the kiosk and lining up the lounge chairs and could sit quietly and look out at the ocean, waiting, at peace. Or at night when she walked down the shore toward the modest pensión in the old part of Marbella, just like in the old days—centuries ago—in Melilla, when she closed up the Yamila. The hardest thing to get used to when she got out of El Puerto had been the bustle of the outside world, the noises, the traffic, the beaches full of people, the deafening music from the bars and discotheques, the flocks of people all along the coast from Torremolinos to Sotogrande. After a year and a half of strict routine and order, Teresa sometimes felt more uncomfortable on the outside than she’d felt behind bars. In prison, they told stories about inmates with long sentences who got out and then tried to find a way—that is, a crime—to get back into that single place in the world where they felt at home. Teresa never believed that, until one day, sitting in the same place where she was sitting now, smoking, she was suddenly swept by homesickness, if it could be called that, for the order and routine and silence of the life behind bars. Jail is home for nobody but the unfortunate of the earth, Patty had said once. For people who don’t have any dreams.

  Abbé Faria—Teresa had finished The Count of Monte Cristo and many other novels, and she was still buying books, which sat in piles around her room in the pensión—was not one of those who considered prison home. On the contrary: the old prisoner had yearned to get out so that he could recover the life that had been stolen from him. Like Edmond Dantès, but too late. After thinking a lot about this, Teresa had come to the conclusion that the treasure that belonged to the two men was simply a pretext for staying alive, dreaming of escape, feeling that they were free despite the locks and bars and chains and walls of the Château d’If. And in the case of Lieutenant O’Farrell, the story of the cache of lost coca was also, in its way, a means of staying free—which may have been why Teresa never entirely believed it. Although now, when she was finally living in a world with real days, not just numbers on a calendar, she found that she wanted to believe in something. She wanted to have something just that clear-cut to live for.

  Now what? she had asked herself as she’d stepped into the street outside the prison. The answer had come from O’Farrell, who sent her to some friends who owned kiosks on the beaches at Marbella. “They won’t ask questions or exploit you too much,” she’d said. “Or fuck you if you don’t want them to.” The job made Teresa’s parole possible—she still had more than a year of her debt to society to pay off, and the only limitation on her was that she stay in one place and make an appearance once a week at the local police station. The job also paid enough for a room in a pensión on Calle San Lázaro, some books and clothes, food, tobacco, a few sniffs of coke from time to time—and the packages of Mo
roccan chocolate for spiking the Bisontes she smoked in her room at night or during slow hours on the beach, like now.

  A seagull dropped down, watchfully gliding near the shore. It skimmed the surface of the water and flew out seaward without finding anything. Fuck you, thought Teresa, inhaling, as she watched it fly away. Fucking wolf with wings. She’d once liked seagulls; she had considered them romantic, until she got to know them on the trips back and forth across the Strait in the Phantom, and especially one afternoon, in the early days, when something went wrong with the engine in the middle of the ocean. They had both tried to get the engine started, and Santiago stayed at it while she lay down to rest, watching the gulls circle lazily nearby. He warned her to cover her face, because gulls were known, he said, to peck at people if they fell asleep. The memory came back with crystal-clear images: the quiet water, the seagulls floating on the water around the drifting speedboat or gliding and fluttering above it, and Santiago aft, working on the engine, covered with grease to his elbows, his naked torso with the tattoo of Christ on one arm, on the other those initials—whose, she never found out.

  She inhaled several times more, letting the hash spread slowly through her veins, toward her heart and brain. She tried not to think much about Santiago, just as she tried to keep her headaches at bay by taking a couple of aspirin before it was too late and the pain moved in for hours, shrouding her in an exhausting cloud of queasiness and unreality.

  Generally she managed not to think too much, period, about Santiago or anybody or anything. She had discovered too many uncertainties and horrors lurking in every thought that went beyond the here and now, or the practical. Sometimes, especially when she was lying awake at night, she couldn’t keep herself from remembering. But as long as she didn’t actually think, the remembering would give her no more than a sensation of movement toward nowhere, like a boat adrift. That was why she now smoked hashish. The smoke in her lungs—which may have traveled with me in twenty-kilo bundles from Morocco, she sometimes thought, amused by the paradox, when she scraped around in her pocket to pay for a miserable little bag of it—accentuated that sense she had of drifting off, drifting away. It brought with it not consolation or indifference, but rather a gentle stupor. It made her unsure that it was she herself she was remembering, as though there were several Teresas lurking in her memory, none with any direct relation to the Teresa of today.

  Maybe it’s that this is life, she would tell herself, confused and puzzled. Maybe old age, when it comes, is about looking back and seeing the many strangers that you have been and in whom you can’t quite recognize yourself. With that idea in her head, sometimes she took out the torn photograph and looked at it, realizing that the features of the man that had been torn from the photo mixed in her memory with those of Santiago Fisterra, as though the two of them had been one. It was the opposite of what happened with the girl in the photo, the one with the big black eyes, who had shattered into so many different women that it was no longer possible to recompose her into just one.

  These were Teresa’s thoughts from time to time, until she realized that they were, or could be, the trap. So from then on she seized at the recourse of keeping her mind blank—allowing the smoke to run slowly through her blood and the tequila to calm her with its familiar taste. Those women who resembled her, those other Teresas, were falling into the past, floating like dead leaves on water.

  That was also why she read so much, now. Reading, she’d learned in prison, especially novels, allowed her to inhabit her mind in a new way—as though by blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, she might witness her own life as if it were happening to somebody else. Besides teaching her things, reading helped her think differently, or think better, because on the page, others did it for her. Although it was also true that with novels you could apply your point of view to every situation or character. Even to the voice that told the story: sometimes it would be that of a narrator, either with a name or anonymous, and sometimes it would be your own. She had discovered with surprise and pleasure that as she turned each page, the book was written, as though for the first time, all over again.

  When she got out of El Puerto, Teresa had continued to read, and her choices were guided by intuitions, titles, first lines, cover illustrations. So now, in addition to her leather-bound Monte Cristo, she had her own books, which she bought one by one, cheap editions that she found at street markets or in used-book shops, or pocket books that she bought after giving spin after spin to those revolving racks. She would read novels written long ago by men and women whose portraits were sometimes on the back cover or the flap of the dust jacket, and also modern novels about love, adventure, travel. Of all she had read, her favorites were Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon, by a Brazilian writer named Jorge Amado; Anna Karenina, about the life of a Russian aristocrat, written by another Russian; and A Tale of Two Cities, which made her cry at the end, when the brave Englishman—Sydney Carton was his name—consoled the frightened young woman by taking her hand as she walked toward the guillotine. She also read that book about a doctor married to a millionaire that Patty had suggested she leave till later, and another, very strange one, hard to understand, that had drawn her in because from the first moment she recognized the land and the language and the soul of the characters that ran through its pages. The book was called Pedro Páramo, and although Teresa never fully unlocked its mysteries, she returned to it over and over again, opening it at random to reread a few pages. The way the words flowed fascinated her, as though she had peered into an unknown, shadowy, magical place that was related to something she herself possessed—she was sure of that—in some dark part of her blood and memory: I came to Comala because I was told that my father, a certain Pedro Páramo, was living there. . . .

  So after a great deal of reading in El Puerto de Santa María, Teresa went on adding books to her inner library, one after another, on her free day each week, on nights when sleep would not come. Even the familiar fear of the gray light of dawn could be held at bay, sometimes, if she opened the book that always lay on the night table.

  Tony arrived. Still young, with a beard, a ring in each ear, his skin tan from many Marbella summers. A T-shirt with the Osborne bull on it. A beach professional—or beach bum, perhaps, living off tourists, with no apologies. No apparent emotions at all. In the time she’d been there, Teresa had never seen him angry or in a particularly good mood, excited or disappointed, and certainly never cheery. He managed the kiosk with dispassionate efficiency, earned good money, was courteous with the customers and inflexible with the bores and troublemakers. Under the counter, he kept a baseball bat for emergencies, and he served the municipal police that patrolled the beaches snifters of cognac in the morning and gin and tonics when they were off duty. When Teresa came to meet him, shortly after getting out of El Puerto, Tony looked at her long and hard and said he’d give her a job because a friend had asked him to. “But no drugs, no alcohol in front of the customers, no picking them up or letting them pick you up, no sticking your hand in the cash drawer, or I’ll throw you out on the fucking street. And if you stick your hand in the cash drawer, I’ll also bust your face. The hours are eight to eight, plus the time it takes you to pick up after we close. Take it or leave it.”

  Teresa had taken it. She needed a legal gig in order to satisfy the conditions of her parole, and eat, and sleep under a dry roof. And Tony and his kiosk were as good or bad as anything else.

  She finished smoking the basuco, burning the tips of her fingers, and then finished off the tequila and orange juice in one long gulp. The first swimmers were beginning to arrive, with their towels and their suntan lotion. The guy with the fishing rod was still down on the shoreline, and the sun was rising higher and higher, warming the sand. A nice-looking man was doing exercises down past the lounge chairs, gleaming with sweat like a horse after a long race. She could almost smell his skin. Teresa stood watching him for a while—his flat stomach, his back muscles flexing with each push-up or twis
t of his torso. Once in a while he would pause to catch his breath, looking down at the ground as though he were thinking, and she watched him with her own thoughts running around and around in her head. Flat stomachs, back muscles. Men with bronzed, weather-beaten skin smelling of sweat, jealous under their pants. Chale. It was so easy to catch them, and yet so hard, despite everything, despite how predictable they were. And so simple to become a mere “girlfriend,” an appendage, a nothing, when you thought with your pussy, or even when you just thought so much that finally it was all the same, you were stupid from being so fucking smart. Since she’d been on the outside again, Teresa had had only one sexual encounter: a young waiter at a kiosk on the other end of the beach, one Saturday night when instead of heading off for her room she stayed around, drinking a few drinks and smoking a couple of joints while she sat on the sand and watched the lights of the fishing boats in the distance and dared herself not to remember. The waiter’s timing when he came up to her was perfect, and he was cute, clever, and funny enough to make her laugh, so they wound up a couple of hours later in his car, parked in an abandoned lot near the bullring. It was an encounter that just happened, and Teresa went into it with more curiosity than real desire—she watched herself, absorbed in her own reactions and emotions. The first man in a year and a half—something many of the girls in the prison would have given months of freedom for.

  But she picked the wrong place and the wrong company. Those lights out on the black ocean, she later decided, were to blame. The waiter, a kid who resembled the man doing exercises down by the lounge chairs—no doubt why this memory had come to her now—was selfish and clumsy, and the condom that she made him put on after looking for a good long time for a pharmacy open at that hour didn’t make things any better. It was so uncomfortable inside the car that she had to struggle even to unzip her jeans. When they finished, the kid was visibly ready to go home and get some sleep, and Teresa was unsatisfied and furious with herself—more furious still with the silent woman who looked back at her from behind the red cigarette-ember in the car window: a luminous dot like those on the fishing boats that worked all night, and on the boats in her memory. So she pulled on her jeans again, got out of the car, said, So long, nice knowing you. She hadn’t even caught the kid’s name, and if it mattered to him, then que chingue a su madre.