And she leaves.
23
When Nurit Iscar goes downstairs to make the coffee that’s going to help her face a new day, none of her visitors remain. She doesn’t know at what point they left, nor in what condition, but she imagines that everyone who ended up spending Sunday night in her house will by now be back home and struggling to get a grip on Monday morning, just like her. Beating sweetener into a paste of instant coffee and water to make café batido (you should use real sugar for this, the kind that comes from canes, not labs, but she got into the habit of mixing coffee and sugar granules together this way back in the days when she wasn’t worried about her weight and was happy to consume the high-calorie version), she thinks how the quotidian – banal, even – elements of daily life can get mixed up with crime in a fusion that both robs the horror of any drama and makes simple things more horrifying. Is it right to be making coffee when last night a corpse was hanging from a tree? Is it defensible to go calmly about breakfast in the belief that that death may be part of some greater criminal plan or project? To blow on your too-hot coffee while suspecting that if you don’t act quickly enough there may be yet another death? It must be, because that is what she’s doing at the moment. Our days are full of coffee-making and other small actions that can be passed over in a story, but not in real life. Penélope Cruz also goes to the bathroom for a crap, Paula Sibona likes to say when they’re talking about the differences between imaginary worlds and real ones. Fiction and art dispense with coffee-mixing and toilet bowls. Untrue, as her friend Carmen Terrada would say. Duchamp didn’t, nor did Jacques Prévert: “Il a mis le café. Dans la tasse”. Why does she still remember that poem she learned at school at sixteen, in a language of which she can now barely stammer a few words? Nurit Iscar sits down to drink her black coffee. She looks out of the window towards the area where this property’s garden dissolves into grassland. She wonders how many different shades of green the pasture contains, but she doesn’t try counting them. That would take away the magic, it would mean treating something individually that can only be appreciated en masse. She’d like to go again and see the oak from which Collazo was found hanging, but isn’t sure she’d be brave enough. What links the deaths of all these men as the pasture links different greens in a series of undifferentiated tones? Is there something behind the deaths, or are they – Jaime Brena, the Crime boy and she – a bunch of paranoiacs looking for a crime where there’s only a string of coincidences? Why do we always need an explanation for death? It’s true, though, that we don’t demand the same answers of a natural death as of a violent one. In the case of natural death one immediately comes up against the impossibility of finding an ultimate meaning, a why. Why is life finite? What happens after death? Is there another chance, another life after this one, eternal life or whatever you want to call it, something to elevate the concept of death beyond rotting flesh for worms to eat? And she rues her own rational, untrusting nature, the scepticism that means she can only believe in what she sees: worms are what she believes in. Sometimes she regrets being agnostic, too, and envies people who have faith in something. In whatever. Only for a moment, though. Then she quickly reverts to trusting in her own beliefs. Or rather in what she doesn’t believe. Now Nurit stands gazing out at the pasture, not drinking her coffee but with her hands around the cup; she likes warming her palms this way even when it’s not cold. But the coffee doesn’t stop her thinking about death, violent deaths in particular, and all the questions they raise. The search for a meaning shifts, locating itself in something that ought to be easier to decipher than “the hereafter”, something earthly, a death ordained not by nature or some god, but by a person, someone like us. And the fact of that death being decreed by someone like us seems to put us on an equal footing with the assassin, making the moral imperative to find an answer all the more urgent. Even if there are no answers. We may even prefer to accept a conclusion we know could be false than to have to bear the uncertainty of not knowing who, and why.
Betty Boo Page 22