The Invisible Guardian

by Redondo, Dolores

  Her mother was still there, leaning against the table watching her. Amaia heard the short, rhythmic pants from her chest as she caught her breath. She heard her sigh deeply, almost in relief. She heard her turn on the tap, wash the rolling pin. She heard her come closer and kneel down beside her without taking her eyes off her. Amaia saw her leaning over her own face, studying her features; her dead eyes, her mouth frozen in a shout that would have been a prayer. Her mother’s mouth was contracted in an expression of curiosity that didn’t reach her frozen eyes, which remained unmoved. She came so close she almost brushed against her, as if, feeling remorse for her crime, she was about to kiss her. The mother’s kiss that never arrived. She opened her mouth and licked the blood that was flowing slowly from the wound and running down Amaia’s face. She smiled as she got up and didn’t stop smiling all the while as she picked the little girl up in her arms and buried her in the kneading trough.

  ‘Amaia,’ the voice was calling.

  Aunt Engrasi, Ros and James were looking at her from the workshop door. He tried to move towards her, but her aunt stopped him, catching him by the sleeve.

  ‘Amaia,’ she called her niece again, softly but firmly.

  Kneeling on the floor, Amaia looked towards the old kneading trough with an expression on her face that was almost a childish pout.

  ‘Amaia Salazar,’ Engrasi said again.

  Amaia jumped, as if the call had caught her by surprise. Her hand moved to her waist, she pulled out her gun and aimed it towards the void.

  ‘Amaia, look at me,’ ordered Engrasi.

  Amaia’s gaze remained blank and she swallowed repeatedly, trembling as though she were out in the rain without any clothes on.

  ‘Amaia.’

  ‘No,’ she murmured the first time. Then she shouted, ‘No!’

  ‘Amaia, look at me,’ ordered her aunt, as if talking to a little girl. Amaia looked at her, frowning. ‘What’s happening, Amaia?’

  ‘Don’t let this happen, Aunt Engrasi.’ Her voice had dropped an octave .

  ‘It’s not happening, Amaia.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘No, Amaia, this happened when you were a little girl, but you’re a woman now.’

  ‘Don’t let her eat me.’

  ‘Nobody can hurt you, Amaia.’

  ‘Don’t let this happen.’

  ‘Look at me, Amaia, this will never happen again. You’re a woman, you’re a police officer and you have a pistol. Nobody will hurt you.’

  The mention of the weapon made her look at her hands and on seeing the pistol she seemed surprised to find it there. She was aware of James and Ros’s presence, that they were watching her from the entrance, pale and silent. She lowered the weapon very slowly.

  James didn’t let go of her hand on the way back home, nor when he sat down beside her to contemplate her in silence while Ros and her aunt made camomile tea in the kitchen.

  Amaia remained silent, listening to her aunt’s distant whispering and assessing the tense expression on the face of her husband, who was smiling with that preoccupied air that parents have when they look at their injured children in hospital. But it didn’t matter, she felt secretly selfish and satisfied, because, along with the incredible fatigue assailing her, she felt renewed, like Lazarus rising from the dead.

  Ros placed the cups on a low table near the sofa and concentrated on lighting the fire in the hearth; her aunt came back into the living room, sat down opposite them and uncovered the mugs, allowing the sickly smell of the camomile to rise in a steaming cloud.

  James stared at Engrasi. She nodded her head as if weighing up the situation and sighed.

  ‘Well, I think the moment has now come for you to tell me what I ought to know.’

  ‘I don’t know where to start,’ said Engrasi, pulling her dressing gown round her.

  ‘Start by explaining what happened tonight and what I saw in the workshop.’

  ‘What you saw tonight in the workshop was a terrifying episode of post-traumatic stress.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress? That’s the paranoia suffered by some soldiers after returning from the front line, isn’t it?’

  ‘Precisely, but it’s not only soldiers who suffer from it. It can occur in anyone who’s suffered a one-off or continuous episode in which they genuinely felt they were about to die a violent death.’

  ‘And that’s what happened to Amaia.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘But why? Because of something that happened to her at work?’

  ‘No, fortunately she’s never felt that exposed to danger whilst at work.’

  James looked at Amaia, who was smiling slightly as she listened to the conversation with her gaze lowered. Engrasi recalled all the knowledge she had acquired during her years in the Psychology Department, which she had mentally reviewed hundreds of times hoping that this day would never arrive.

  ‘Post-traumatic stress is a sleeping assassin. Sometimes it stays in a latent state for months, or even years after the traumatic situation from which it originated. A real situation in which the individual was in real danger. The stress acts like a defence system that identifies signs of danger with the aim of protecting the individual and preventing them from putting themselves in danger again. For example, if a woman is raped in a car on a dark road, it’s logical that in the future similar situations, night time, the open countryside, the inside of a dark vehicle, will cause her to feel uncomfortable, which she will identify as a sign of danger and try to protect herself.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ commented Ros.

  ‘It does up to a point, but post-traumatic stress is like an allergic reaction, completely disproportionate to the threat. It’s as if this woman were to pull out a can of pepper spray whenever she smells leather or pine air-freshener or hears an owl hooting in the night.’

  ‘Pepper spray or a pistol,’ said James, looking at Amaia.

  ‘This stress,’ Aunt Engrasi continued, ‘produces an extraordinary level of alertness in those who suffer from it, which manifests as light sleep, nightmares, irritability and an irrational terror of being attacked again. This shows itself as an out of control defensive rage that causes them to become violent with the sole aim of defending themselves from the attack they believe they are suffering, because they’re reliving it, not the attack itself, but all the pain and fear they suffered at that moment, like the soldiers who’ve spent time on the front line.’

  ‘When we went into the workshop it was as if she were acting out a stage performance …’

  ‘She was reliving a moment of great danger. And she was doing so with the same intensity as if it were occurring at that instant,’ she said, looking at Amaia. ‘My poor, brave little girl. Suffering and feeling like she did that night.’

  ‘But …’ James looked back at Amaia, who was holding a steaming cup of untouched tea in her other hand. ‘Do you mean to say that what happened in the workshop tonight was caused by an episode of post-traumatic stress, a defensive reaction to signs that Amaia believed to be warnings of mortal danger? Or rather, that Amaia thought she was going to be killed …’

  Engrasi nodded, raising her trembling hands to her mouth.

  ‘And what triggered this? Because it’s never happened before,’ he said, looking tenderly at his wife.

  ‘It can be anything, an episode can be triggered by anything, but I suppose that being here in Elizondo will have been a contributing factor … The workshop, those crimes involving young girls … And the truth is that it has happened to her before. It happened to her a long time ago, when she was nine years old.’

  James looked at Amaia, who seemed about to faint.

  ‘You had episodes of post-traumatic stress when you were nine years old?’ His voice was barely audible.

  ‘I don’t remember them,’ she replied. ‘In fact, I haven’t remembered what happened that night for the past twenty-five years. I suppose that by repeating it enough times I came to think that it didn’t really happen.�
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  James took the untouched cup from Amaia’s hand and put it on the table, took both her hands in his and looked into her eyes.

  Amaia smiled, but she had to lower her gaze in order to say, ‘When I was nine years old, my mother followed me to the workshop one night and hit me on the head with an iron rolling pin; she hit me again when I was lying unconscious on the floor, then she buried me in the kneading trough and tipped two fifty-kilo bags of flour on top of my body. She only told my father because she thought I was already dead. Because of this, I lived with my aunt for the rest of my childhood.’ Her voice had become impersonal and devoid of all modulation, as if it were generated by a computer.

  Ros was weeping silently and looking at her sister.

  ‘For the love of God, Amaia! Why haven’t you told me about this?’ exclaimed James in horror.

  ‘I don’t know. I swear that I’ve barely thought about this in recent years. I had it buried somewhere in my subconscious; in addition to what really happened, there was always an official version, I repeated it so many times that I came to believe it. I thought I had forgotten. And, furthermore, it’s so … embarrassing … I’m not like that, I didn’t want you to think …’

  ‘You have nothing to be embarrassed about, you were a little girl and the person who was supposed to care for you harmed you. It’s the cruellest thing I’ve heard in my life, and I’m so sorry, sweetheart, so sorry that something so horrible happened to you, but nobody can harm you anymore.’

  Amaia looked at him and smiled.

  ‘You can’t imagine how good I feel, I feel like a great weight’s been lifted off me. The blockage,’ she said, suddenly thinking of Dupree’s words. ‘I was probably already stressed because of that. And coming back here brought all those memories back too, and keeping them from you has made things even harder for me.’

  James moved away from her a little so as to be able to look at her.

  ‘And what’s going to happen now?’

  ‘What do you want to happen?’

  ‘I understand that you feel good now, like a great weight’s been taken off your shoulders, but what happened yesterday, Amaia, when you drew your weapon on your sister, and in the workshop tonight, is no joke.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You lost control, Amaia.’

  ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘But it could have. How can we be sure you won’t suffer another episode like that?’

  Amaia didn’t answer. She pulled free of James’s embrace and stood up. James looked at Engrasi.

  ‘You’re the expert, what do we need to do?’

  ‘What we’re doing now, talk about it. Retell what happened, get her to explain how she feels, to share it with those who love her. There’s no other treatment.’

  ‘And why didn’t you give her this treatment when she was nine?’ he said without hiding his reproach. Engrasi stood up and walked towards Amaia, who was leaning against the fireplace.

  ‘I suppose that deep down I hoped that she would have forgotten it, I showered her with love. I tried to help her forget it, not to think about it. But how could a little girl stop thinking about the harm her own mother wanted to do her? How could she stop missing the kisses she would never give her, the bedtime stories she would never tell her?’ Engrasi lowered her voice until it was a whisper, as if the terrible, harsh words she was speaking would hurt less that way. ‘I tried to play that role, I put her to bed each night, I cared for her and loved her more than anything else in the world. God knows if I’d had a daughter of my own I wouldn’t have loved her more. And I prayed, begging that she would forget about it, that she wouldn’t have to drag that horror around with her for her whole childhood. We talked about it sometimes, we would always say “what happened”, then she stopped mentioning it and I hoped with all my heart that she wouldn’t remember it again.’ Two fat tears ran down her cheek. ‘I was wrong,’ she said in a broken voice.

  Amaia hugged Engrasi tightly and rested her face against her grey hair, which, as usual, smelt of honeysuckle.

  ‘It won’t happen again, James,’ she asserted.

  ‘You can’t be entirely certain.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But I’m not, and I’m not going to let you go around with a weapon if you might suffer another one of those panic attacks.’

  Amaia let go of Engrasi and crossed the room in long strides.

  ‘James, I’m a police inspector, I can’t work without my weapon.’

  ‘Don’t work, then,’ James declared.

  ‘I can’t abandon the case now, it would be a disaster for my career, nobody would ever have confidence in me again.’

  ‘That’s secondary compared to your health.’

  ‘I’m not going to abandon it, James, I can’t, and I wouldn’t even if I could.’ Her tone of voice showed the decisiveness and strength that were normally typical of her. She wasn’t Amaia, she was Inspector Salazar. James got up and stood in front of her.

  ‘OK, but unarmed.’

  He expected her to protest, but she stared at him and then looked at her sister, who was still crying.

  ‘Alright,’ she agreed, ‘unarmed.’

  39

  Víctor still shaved the traditional way, with a bar of La Toja soap, a shaving brush and a razor. In an ideal world he would have used a cutthroat razor like his father and grandfather had, but he had tried it once and it wasn’t for him. In any case, he achieved a smooth shave with the razor blade and Flora loved the fragrance the cream left on his skin. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled at the rather ridiculous figure looking back at him, his face covered in foam. Flora. If she liked him like that, that was how he would be. His life had changed the moment he had admitted to himself that he didn’t want to give her up, that Flora, with her strong character and desire to control everything, was the woman who had his exact measure, and the things that he had come to hate about her, her exhaustive domination, her authoritarian nature and how she dictated everything he did, were now things he knew how to value in her.

  He had lost the best years of his life in a haze under what he now accepted was the malign influence of alcohol, which was the only way out then, the only escape route via which he could flee the instincts that rang warning bells against Flora’s perpetual tyranny. He had been unable to realise that Flora was the only woman who could love him, the only woman he could love, and the only one he wanted to please. When he thought about it, he realised that he had begun to drink like that to take revenge on her, to both escape and appease Flora, because the alcohol allowed him to adapt to her iron discipline by dulling his senses and making him into the husband she wanted him to be.

  Until he lost control of the means, this had been the exact formula which could make life under Flora’s domination tolerable. What an irony that the same thing that had kept their marriage going for years was the reason Flora gave for leaving him. During the first year following their separation he had fought a fierce battle against the addiction, a battle that had caused him to hit rock bottom in the first few months, a state he could barely recall, since his memories were blurry and unsteady like an old black and white movie burnt away by the nitrate on the film. Early one morning, after several days locked up in the house, abandoned to drinking and self-pity, he woke up on the floor, half drowned in his own vomit, and felt a sense of emptiness and coldness like never before.

  Only then, when he realised he was going to lose the only important thing in his life, did he start to make a change.

  Flora had not wanted to get a divorce, although they had separated in every other sense, as distant as strangers and as far from one another, not that he wanted things to be that way. Flora made the decision and applied new rules to their relationship without asking his opinion. To be fair, he recognised that he had been unable to make any decision that didn’t involve drinking at that stage, but never, even in the worst of his many alcohol-induced abysses, had he wanted to separate from her.

  Now th
ings seemed to be changing between them, his efforts, the number of dry days, his neat appearance and the little things he did to please her seemed, finally, to be bearing fruit. He had been visiting Flora at the workshop every day for months and every day he had asked her to come and eat a meal with him, to go for a walk, to go to Mass together, to accompany him on his business trips. And she had refused until that very week, when she had appeared to soften and accept his company again after he had taken her the bunch of roses to celebrate their anniversary.

  He would have given anything, he would have done anything, he felt capable of meeting any condition necessary to return to her side once more. Giving up alcohol had been the most important decision of his life; at first he thought that each day he spent without drinking would consist of a horribly torturous reality hanging over him, but in recent months he had discovered that there was extraordinary strength hidden within the act of deciding to give it up. He encouraged himself with this each day, finding freedom and indomitable resolution that he had only known in his youth, in the self-control he exercised over himself when he had still been what he wanted to be. He went to the wardrobe and chose the shirt she liked so much, and, after inspecting it, decided that it was a bit rumpled from the way it had been hanging and needed to be ironed. He whistled to himself as he went down the stairs.

  The clock on the Church of Santiago showed that it was almost eleven, but the light level was more like twilight than morning. It was one of those days when dawn got stuck at first light and the sun never really rose fully. Those dismal mornings were part of her childhood memories, in which she remembered the many days when she dreamed of the warm, affectionate presence of the sun. One of her classmates had once given her a travel agency’s huge, full-colour brochure and she had spent months poring over its pages, stopping at the photos depicting sunny coasts and impossibly blue skies while wisps of fog from the river drifted up nearby streets. Amaia cursed that place where the sun sometimes failed to rise for several days, as if a criminal mastermind had come in the night and stolen it away to an Icelandic island, leaving them deprived of its joy, like the people at the Poles with their long, sunless nights.