“You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”
Fernando smiled with an innocence that was repulsive in a man with deep wrinkles and white hair. He took out a small book of notes and photographs and opened it at random. He turned it toward María and leaned back in his chair smugly. There were personal photographs of the lawyer, photos that she didn’t even remember ever having: in her earliest school outing, her first communion, in high school, with her father fishing on the San Lorenzo bridge. There was also the photograph of the day she graduated from college and a photo of her wedding day. Each one of them was annotated with the date and place it was taken. Even more detailed was the list of cases she had taken on, the sentences she had won and lost, the names of her clients, the judges who had overseen the trials. And the dozens of newspaper clippings and personal annotations about the case against César Alcalá were particularly thorough.
“I know everything about you. For years I’ve done nothing but devote myself to knowing you,” said Fernando, deepening the feeling of perplexity that the book had produced in María.
María turned the pages with growing fear. What kind of a sick mind could dedicate that much effort to gathering such information, except a psychopath? She shut the book with a slam.
“This is nothing. Photographs and dates. The fact that you’ve spied on me doesn’t mean you know me.”
Fernando picked up the book and put it away under the table. He lifted his eyes. Now it was a gaze filled with affliction.
“I know what it is to want the night to come so you can sleep and not being able to because your mind is filled with nightmares and taking sleeping pills to find a deep sleep that still isn’t restorative. I know what it is to be abused by others, humiliated and beaten, and to have cowardice keep you from rebelling against it. And I know what it is to find a cause that justifies our miserable lives. A just cause. Something that allows us to forget. We focus our efforts and our sleepless nights on that cause to silence our monsters. But they are like bloodthirsty, voracious gods that aren’t satisfied with the sacrifices we offer them. They return to torment us time and time again, as soon as we relax our minds and remember who we really are: a prisoner mistreated for years in a Soviet concentration camp; a woman beaten by her husband again and again. We need to keep believing that the weak, sickly part is something tiny in us; better to be a spiteful son full of hate who decides to get rich again from zero to avenge his mother; better to be a prestigious lawyer, fair and inflexible, able to send a corrupt cop to jail. But none of that heals us, does it? We can’t escape what we are. Every time we look in a mirror, every time we feel personal or professional failure, that tide rises again, reminding us of our weaknesses, our cowardice, and our self-sacrifice. And we are left naked and without excuses. That is why we need someone to save or someone to condemn. Some object of our love or our hate. Someone who makes us forget.
“I’ve come to believe that the only reason I’ve stayed alive all these years was to see fall, one by one, those men who destroyed my life and killed my mother and condemned my brother to insanity. Publio and your father, Gabriel, have been my obsession for decades. But the truth is I saw my father die and I didn’t feel happy about it. Or sad. I simply realized that he was something that no longer concerned me. I knew that Gabriel had cancer, and the only thing I felt was fear. Can you understand that? The same fear as now: if he dies, what cause will be left for me? I never aspired to hear him apologize, or to kill him with my own hands. The same with Publio. Now I know that not even when I see that asshole fall will I feel anything more than slight relief.
“But you, María, are different. You have nothing to do with everything that’s marked my life, and yet, in you your father’s errors and sins are perpetuated. It’s like a perverse Machiavellian game in which life repeats itself in the same way over and over again, not letting us escape the wheel. I know that you are a good woman, although maybe you don’t even know that yourself, and maybe at this point in the story it’s a cowardly reason to be sitting here in front of you. But even though you don’t believe it, you are the last opportunity left to me to give some meaning to these last forty years of my life. Everything’s gone. Including me. It’s not surprising people think I’m dead. I am. I’ve been wandering through life for forty years without living it. And I want to rest.”
How long had he had been talking? How many useless words had he wasted trying to explain the inexplicable? He had gone into the hospital with the clear intention of confronting María and telling her the truth. But the truth hadn’t come out of his mouth; it had refused. It was too horrible, too painful. The only thing he had achieved was sketching twisted traces of feelings, resentments, and dried-up emotions. But he hadn’t said what he really wanted to say.
He reflected for a few seconds with his hands crossed on the table, staring at some dried drops of coffee. He jotted down something on a page of his date book. He tore out the page and left it beside María.
“Tomorrow night I will be at this address. If Inspector Alcalá wants to see his daughter alive, persuade him to give you the documents that incriminate Publio. If you don’t come or you don’t bring those documents, I will disappear. And I can assure you that you will never see me again, but also that they’ll never find that girl.”
* * *
María didn’t know how long she had been sitting at the table in the cafeteria staring at that piece of paper in her hands, when she heard the sound of some plates falling to the ground. The clatter made her jump. Fernando was no longer there, but there was still that somewhat nineteenth-century smell of his cologne and that page in her hand. And his words.
She took the elevator up to the third floor. The two policemen who were guarding César Alcalá’s door got up out of their chairs when they saw her approach with decisive steps and a tense jaw. María calibrated them with her gaze. They were young and didn’t look very experienced. She could see they were bored and annoyed by the task they’d been assigned.
“I need to see the prisoner.”
“That’s not possible, ma’am.”
“I’m his lawyer. My name is María Bengoechea. If you don’t let me in right now, I will have to ask you for your badge numbers and report you for keeping me from seeing my client.”
The officers got a bit frightened when they checked María’s credentials. Her attitude and her determination made them step away from the door, although one of them said they should check with somebody.
“Go ahead. Inspector Marchán knows me. He knows the situation, and he has no problem with me seeing Alcalá,” she lied without stammering.
The name of Inspector Marchán had a soothing effect on the officers. They looked at each other and one let her enter, but only with the door ajar.
“What do you think I’m going to do, help him escape?” replied María without blinking. That was exactly what she was going to do.
César Alcalá was laid up in bed with several cushions at his back. In spite of the bandages on his right arm and stomach he didn’t look too bad. Maybe the bags under his eyes were softer and more haggard, and he was a bit paler. But María didn’t have time to feel sorry for him. She went over to him, keeping herself in check.
“How are you feeling?”
César Alcalá nodded. His lips were dry. María handed him a glass of water, and as she did she got close enough to whisper into his ear.
“We don’t have much time. I guess Romero has you up to date.”
César Alcalá lifted the bandaged arm.
“He took his role very seriously. So much that I believed him.”
A short circuit of the present brought María an image from the past. She imagined her father shooting Guillermo Mola on the steps of the church. It must have seemed real, so that everyone believed it.
“It had to look real for them to take you out of there instead of just taking you to the infirmary. Do you think you can walk?”
César Alcalá shifted his gaze to the
door. One of the officers was talking on the phone. César figured they didn’t have much time.
“Maybe in a couple of days I wouldn’t burst the stitches.”
María shook her head. She placed a pillow beneath his head and pretended to check on the bottle of saline solution that hung on a perch.
“We don’t have time. It has to be today.” And she hurriedly explained what had happened in the last few days. Her last meeting with Lorenzo and then Marchán’s offer.
Hearing that name, Alcalá leaned up on one elbow.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with him. He betrayed me once, letting me get sold out. And he’ll do it again. The only thing he wants is the proof against Publio. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he works for him.”
“He isn’t the only one. I was just talking to Fernando Mola in the cafeteria. Do you know who he is?”
César Alcalá let himself fall slowly back against the pillow, without taking his eyes off María.
“He is Isabel Mola’s older son … I thought he was dead.”
“Well, he’s not. And he claims to know where your daughter is.”
César’s eyes opened wide, and the cracks in his lip opened so much they started to bleed a little.
“That’s not possible. What do the Molas have to do with my daughter?”
María didn’t have time to explain it to him. She needed information, and she needed it now. She knew that the officers at the door wouldn’t take long to find out that she had lied about Marchán giving her permission to see Alcalá.
“It’s too complicated to explain now. But I need you to give me the evidence against Publio. That’s his condition.”
“That is the only thing keeping me and my daughter alive. I don’t trust anyone.”
“Well, you are going to have to trust me,” said María furiously. “Look at you: is this keeping yourself alive? For how long?”
César hesitated, but María’s frenetic gaze didn’t let up. He looked at the officers at the door. One of them was arguing with the other as he opened the door wide.
“Okay. Get me out of here.”
There wasn’t time for anything more. The officers came into the room and demanded that María come with them.
César Alcalá leaned back on the pillow. Then he noticed something beneath the pillowcase. He waited for the door to close, and he pulled out the object. He couldn’t help smiling in admiration. If anyone could get him out of there, it was that strange, unpredictable woman.
* * *
The night shifts on that floor were usually peaceful. The nurses settled into the break room and drank coffee and chatted quietly about their lives outside of those halls filled with bandages, needles, stretchers, and whiny patients. The policemen who were watching over the door were sleepy and bored; they envied the nurses their laughter as they killed time reading old newspapers. Every once in a while one of them opened the door and checked that Alcalá was sleeping, lit by the fluorescent light over his bed. Then they glanced at the room’s padlocked windows and went back to the hallway.
At two in the morning, César went over to one of the windows. They used to be sealed or barred, a measure taken to avoid terminal or depressive patients from jumping into the void, but there had been a small fire a few years back that had forced them to change the sealed panes and remove the bars. Alcalá’s room overlooked a side street, and right on that face of the building there was a fire escape. So the windows on that part were locked with padlocks. The only one who had the keys was the head nurse on each floor.
César stuck his hand into the pocket of his hospital gown. Now he had one too. And he wasn’t interested in knowing how María had managed to get it.
He got dressed as quickly as he could. But his movements were slow. The recently closed wound on his stomach hurt. He went over to the window and introduced the key. The padlock gave easily, to his relief. The window was a sliding pane. He opened it and felt the night’s cold air. The narrow street was deserted, lit by the spotlights on the hospital’s facade. The window was at the height of Alcalá’s midsection. He had to clench his teeth to keep from screaming as he climbed up onto the sill and felt some of his stitches tearing. He reached the rusty railing of the fire escape and looked down once more.
There were only about thirty feet between him and the ground. It was too easy, he thought. Marchán would have noticed that escape route, and he might have placed some patrolmen in the alley. Alcalá curled up in a shadowy area of the fire escape and waited, but no vehicle or officer appeared. Maybe no one had thought that he would be able to get a key, or they hadn’t even bothered to check that there was a fire escape there … Just then he entertained an absurd idea: maybe Marchán had had him put in that room precisely because he knew of the existence of that fire escape leading to a discreet alleyway that Alcalá could slip away through without attracting attention.
It didn’t matter. The fact was he could escape. He knew what that meant. He thought of Romero, right then in isolation in a punishment cell; he imagined what could happen to María if she was ever linked with his escape: it would mean jail and the end of her career. If he was caught it was the end of any hope of a pardon. But he already had one foot on the wet asphalt, and he wasn’t going to look back.
The wound on his stomach had opened up completely, and a stain spread across the inspector’s shirt. But Alcalá didn’t pay any attention to the pain. He didn’t have time to waste. Crouched by the hospital wall, he explored his surroundings. To the right he could make out the growing lights of a large avenue. To the left, the alley blurred into somber entryways and dark corners. He headed left.
He couldn’t go back to his apartment. He knew that would be the first place Marchán would look for him when he found out he’d escaped. He couldn’t hide at María’s house either. The officers protecting her from Ramoneda would discover him immediately. She was going to have think up some way to lose them so she could get to their agreed-upon meeting place. Besides, there was something more important that he had to take care of immediately.
* * *
The small church was closed. It was a conventional building, with no apparent architectural interest. A neighborhood parish in the outskirts that could have been mistaken for a warehouse like so many others in the Zona Franca, the area near the loading docks of the port. But in spite of its bland appearance, César Alcalá felt something when he saw it, a feeling he had almost forgotten. That feeling had nothing to do with religion. Alcalá had never been a churchgoing man, and while he had once defined himself as a believer, his experiences had definitively distanced him from anything close to divinity.
His emotion grew from his memories of his lost life. In that parish he had his first experience as a detective, almost thirty years earlier. Some soulless bastards had stolen the collection box, and when the priest caught them in the act, they beat him brutally. Alcalá was on the case and managed to arrest the perpetrators. Yet the parish priest didn’t want to press charges, and he said he didn’t know who they were in the lineup. A priest lying was nothing new; he had never considered them better or worse than any other person. But for him to lie to protect those individuals who had almost kicked him to death made Alcalá renew his cynicism toward the human race. They struck up a friendship, limited to the kind of a friendship that can exist between a man who doesn’t live in the real world but rather in the kingdom of heaven and hope and another man who can’t lift his feet out of the filth of society and the hell of reality.
Later he would marry in that church, and years later that same parish priest would baptize Marta. Fulfilling those rites of Christian culture was something that didn’t conflict with César’s skepticism. In the end, he told himself, we are part of something that goes beyond beliefs, and he let himself be led by custom. Now times were different; girls didn’t feel the need to marry dressed in white, and some parents rebelled against the church and refused to baptize their children. But then things weren’t so simple. It
was something everyone did without being conscious of that social pressure. And he did it, without questioning whether it was the right thing to do or not.
He rang the bell. The lights of the upstairs window turned on, and a familiar silhouette appeared behind the curtain. A few seconds later the door to the church opened from the inside. In the doorway appeared an old man with sparse, disheveled white hair, a tired expression. He wore a thick wool robe. His eyes were as gray as his thick eyebrows and the hairs that came out of his nose and ears. But they were very lively, and they looked at César with a combination of affection, surprise, and grief.
“Hello, Father Damiel. I know it’s very late.”
The parish priest opened the door all the way and had him come in.
“Late? Yes, for some things it’s too late,” he said in a reproachful tone; but as if he regretted his words, he quickly put a hand on Alcalá’s arm and added, “but for the return of a beloved son, a brother, it’s always early.”
Inside, the flickering light of some votive candles could be seen. The atmosphere was peaceful. Alcalá’s eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness of the inside of the church. When they did, the outlines came into focus, the straight lines in the central space flanked by two rows of wooden benches. At the back, a wooden replica of a Christ by Dalí was hung in the air with two almost invisible cables, creating the sensation that the image levitated over the simple altar of polished stone.
“You’re bleeding. Are you hurt?” the priest asked Alcalá. In that environment, the question sounded strange, with a meaning amplified by the church’s humble spirituality. Everyone bleeds; everyone is hurt. Some wounds close. Others never do.
Alcalá covered his wound with his jacket.
“It’s not serious.” He turned to the parish priest and questioned him with his eyes, without saying a word. The old man nodded.
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel Page 35