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Twist

Page 15

by Harkaitz Cano


  The judge heard the two sides. They handed over all the documentation. They introduced the attorneys. Lazkano and the Toad were left alone: too many emotions in a short period of time.

  “Did you notice the judge’s smell?”

  “His smell?”

  “Yes. What do you think he smelled like?” “Is this another of your let’s submerge ourselves in subjectivity sort of tests?”

  “Tell me: what kind of smell did you perceive in him? I noticed a long time ago that this judge has a peculiar smell.”

  “I don’t know…perfumed?”

  “Perfumed! C’mon, that’s like saying that a color is colorful! I’ll tell you: silvae odorem leges sapiunt…he smells like a forest…” “A forest?”

  “Yes! Like a young oak, like fennel, like dry leaves, like tall grass and moss. He doesn’t smell like flowers, but like a forest.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Do you know what that means? That even though the object of regulation is to avoid the law of the jungle, the law itself is a kind of jungle: legis silva…The Jungle of the Law…We’re about to enter a dense forest, a thick bramble patch. This is not an hortus conclusus…”

  “That bullshit Latin of yours is pretty tiresome, Luis.” Lately, Lazkano addresses him by his first name; the Toad and Diego have established quite a close friendship.

  “Haven’t you read old Horace? And you call yourself a writer? Hortus conclusus…enclosed garden…Aranearum telis fas est leges comparare…the law is comparable to a spiderweb: it only catches small insects.”

  Once again, Lazkano is not sure if he’s serious or if he’s pulling his leg.

  The judge smelled like a forest, and more than twenty years ago, the jungles of El Salvador had entangled their minds. Were the two things related? Did it mean anything?

  Back in the attorney’s office. The last rehearsal before the big day.

  “They won’t admit to the torture easily…”

  “What do you mean they won’t?”

  “Cris is right. Don’t forget who these judges are: it’d be too much for them. The shots to the back of the head, they won’t let those pass by. But torture, that’s a different issue.”

  “But…the bodies were covered in bandages!”

  “I know more than one defense attorney, Lazkano, who’d be cynical enough to use those bandages as evidence of the humanitarian character of the police. You’ve no idea who we’re up against. They’ll call a lot of witnesses, they’ll bring specialists from abroad…”

  “And the insulating tape on their mouths, that’s evidence of humanitarian efforts too?”

  “We can base our argument on that, but it won’t be enough to prove torture in the eyes of these people. Perhaps we could argue the psychological suffering of being locked up for days, we don’t know how many, not knowing where they were…”

  “But they’ll say that’s part of the illegal arrest and kidnapping. Non bis in idem.”

  “Forgive the bullshit Latin, Diego…but Cris is right.”

  “And the torn-out nails?”

  “We’ll have to await a more detailed report, it wouldn’t be the first time they say that the nails came off the fingers on their own. The effect of quicklime, the soil…Given the way they buried them, they’ll hold on to that.”

  “On their own? Please!”

  “Calm yourself down, Lazkano. We’ll request punishment for the torture too, but we must place our focus on the murders, we can’t neglect the premeditation aspect: we’ll highlight, above all, the fact that Zeberio was shot twice. We’ll request the harshest punishment in the law for the murders. But I don’t think we’ll manage to add years to their sentences for affiliation to an armed group.

  “Not that either? So the GAL never existed!” Lazkano shouts.

  “They’ll zigzag around the facts in order to weaken our arguments. I’d bet my own neck that they’ll make up some little tale of the in dubio pro reo kind. And, in any case, the absolute longest they’ll spend in prison is thirty years, and some of them will carry out their sentences in military prisons. And then, we’ll have to see, depending on the court we end up in, whether the robed crow we face there will put them through the third degree…there are a lot of pre-Constitution era dinosaurs in the courts, Diego…I don’t want to give you false hope: if you’re bent on seeing these people rot in jail, it’s going to be better for you to forget about that possibility as soon as possible.”

  “Do you think they’ll pardon them?”

  “Maybe not immediately. They’ve learned about tempo by now, they’re not stupid. They well know that they can’t use adagio prestissimo. But a slow ad libitum, when things calm down a bit and the press starts looking elsewhere…Yes, unfortunately that’s something that might happen…But they won’t even need to; they can just falsify a medical report: you’ve no idea how often these tough military guys develop heart conditions after they’ve overexerted themselves in their duties! These people are owed a lot of favors, Diego, and they’ll be paid generously for their silence when the focus of the stage lights is not on them anymore. They’ve been raised with military discipline, their honor code is cast iron. It’s unlikely they’ll say more than they’ve already said.”

  “And the politicians?”

  “Politicians are more slippery. We can count ourselves lucky if we manage to tickle the throat of one of Fontecha’s high-ranking bosses.”

  “I thought you were more ambitious.”

  “Ambition is a condition of youth, mine has shrunk to the same extent my prostate has swollen. It’ll happen to you too. And then you’ll remember good old dead Agirre Sesma, when the young bulls start to reproach your lack of ambition. Life is but a sigh…A concatenation of sighs that ends with the last breath. That’s all.”

  “I noticed, Luis. I’m not that young myself.”

  Time to eat something. ADELA RETOUCHERIE. ARREGLOS. The street then. The light and the air.

  The judges, the defense attorney, the prosecutors, the lawyers, the judicial secretary, the witnesses, the translators. They all gather, before the start of the hearing, in the same café near the federal court. Conscious of the possibility that they might spend the following night in prison, some of the accused arrive in the café very early in the morning: they are easily recognizable, as they obviously lack the habit of dressing too elegantly. Besides those who work in the courts, quite a few people who’ve nothing to do with the procedural world arrive too. Some regular Madrileños may feel lucky in that café, certain that no one is going to judge them: “I am not one of them, I am free.” They breakfast with the feeling that they don’t owe anyone anything, that while everyone around them is waiting to be judged or to play an important role in declaring someone guilty, that’s not their case. They equate not having to go to court with happiness, with relief, with a lack of duties and responsibilities. We all fool ourselves however we can.

  Agirre Sesma had always compared the atmosphere in that café he knew so well with a sort of utopian space of fair play. Not everyone was the same there, but they all seemed the same. Everyone paid for their coffee. The game hadn’t started yet.

  Needless to say, Javier Fontecha and Rodrigo Mesa aren’t there. They want to avoid the media at all costs. Maybe they went in the back door, like the ambulance that will bring Vargas in, even though the back door is accosted by journalists too. Agirre Sesma finds the atmosphere changed; it’s been a long time since he’s been there and he doesn’t recognize most of the besuited individuals, although the judges give themselves away by the proximity of their bodyguards. He does recognize an attorney, someone a bit younger than him, who in the eighties used to always find himself in the same places Fontecha used to frequent. But the attorney doesn’t recognize him, or maybe he’s pretending to be distracted. Agirre Sesma has his daughter by his side; all the documentation is in a thick folder, and the day’s script in a leather briefcase.

  “Are you nervous, aita?”

  “Lazkan
o should be here already.”

  Cristina leaves her laptop on a table and takes her cell phone out to try calling him again.

  “He’s not picking up.”

  “How strange,” says Agirre Sesma. “He’s called to declare as a witness today. How he was held in El Cerro. How he heard his friends’ screams. Only he can state that. This is very strange.”

  It’s eleven o’clock and they can’t wait any more. Cristina and her father feel weighed down by intense disquiet. Later, when they learn of Lazkano’s desertion, their disquiet will be overtaken by deep disappointment.

  “Why didn’t he come? He started all this.”

  “He must have gotten frightened. He must have his reasons,” asserts Cristina, without much faith in what she’s saying.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” the attorney decides after a while, the broken hiss of his asthmatic breathing louder than ever.

  They pay for their coffees and head toward the court’s entrance. Cristina holds her father’s index finger and they enter the forest on their own, without anyone’s help.

  THREAD OF THREADS

  PEDRO VARGAS DOESN’T HAVE A PAIR of shorts to play tennis in. Rodrigo Mesa, however, does: whiter than white ones, just like his tennis shoes.

  ¡Va!”

  When the ball hits the net’s tape for the umpteenth time and falls by his boss’s side, Vargas begins to think that even though he did it with the best of intentions, perhaps he shouldn’t have raised the net this morning; Rodrigo Mesa often fails in his service, crashing the ball into the taut tape. It would have been better if he’d left it loose, just as it was.

  “Second service!”

  Bong-bong. One bounce, two bounces, ball up: pale yellow shines in the blue sky. Vargas moves forward from the back of the court. The boss’s second serve is weak, he returns it easily, from quite far back, near the lateral line. Vargas likes to make his boss run every now and then although he knows that, ultimately, he has to let him win, and since his boss particularly enjoys seeing him show signs of frustration, sometimes he pretends to be angry, the way he’s seen the tortured John McEnroe do on TV, even though it’s Ivan Lendl who Vargas really likes. He’s Czech, and he likes people of Slavic blood; cold people, even-tempered people who don’t fly off the handle. Since he’s already won a couple of games in this set, Vargas wants to send the ball out on purpose this time; but the ball, determined to fail, miraculously hits the baseline. The boss, unexpectedly, returns well, but his arm is perhaps too close to his body, and the ball goes sideways.

  “The ball was in!” shouts Rodrigo Mesa, smiling, repeating a recurring joke in an advert for Bic shaving razors.

  “Close, very close!” responds Vargas, giving his boss the answer he expects while caressing the sparse beard on his cheeks. In the advert, the umpire is referring to McEnroe’s beard, and the tennis player doesn’t react well to the comment.

  “You cannot be serious!”

  “No, your shave, Mr. McEnroe…it’s very close.”

  “Should we leave it for today?”

  Vargas is surprised: his boss doesn’t usually like to leave things unfinished.

  “Come over for a second.”

  Rodrigo Mesa is drying his wide brow and thinning hair with a towel. He offers it to Vargas afterward, which puts him on his guard, since it’s the second unusual gesture from his boss. His superior’s sweat repels him, but he doesn’t dare refuse his offering and tries to pat the pearls of sweat on his temples with Rodrigo Mesa’s damp towel as naturally as possible.

  “Look, Vargas, they’re wiping the floor with us, we can’t go on like this. Don’t you think?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ve heard you were friends with Alfredo Trota.”

  “We did our military service together.”

  “We can’t go on like this, hands tied, they have everything on their side…and if that wasn’t enough, the refuge on the other side of the border. What are we, scarecrows? This has to end once and for all.”

  Vargas doesn’t say anything.

  “I’ve received instructions, from high up. They’ve green-lit us. Guarantees. Guarantees, Vargas. Do you realize what that means?”

  Vargas nods, although he doesn’t quite follow.

  “The minister came to the last funeral. Do you know that members of his party are carrying guns? No one knows this, but it’s true. They don’t even trust their bodyguards! I saw it at the airport in Hondarribia. With my own eyes. The pilots lock their arms up while the plane is in the air, the law dictates that. I saw them collect their guns one by one before stepping off the plane. These socialists are not stupid, not at all!”

  Vargas thinks to himself: “Weddings bring more weddings; and funerals, more funerals.” He thinks it, but he doesn’t say it.

  Rodrigo Mesa keeps a tennis ball in his hands and, like someone asserting the power of his balls, he squeezes it and crushes it from the bottom until he deforms the hollow rubber sphere.

  “Not everyone will be in the thick of it, but I want you inside. Only a selected few, the finest, like in a drugstore. Como en botica.”

  Only a selected few, the finest, like in a drugstore? Vargas thinks that neither tennis nor refrains are his boss’s strong point. He doesn’t have time to think, however, that many of the evils of this world stem from a lack of command of language.

  “If you’re not sure, we never played this tennis game. And if you are sure…we didn’t either…Do you understand?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Can I count on you, then?”

  Without releasing the ball, Rodrigo Mesa opens his hands like a man offering something, but the truth, as he stares hard into Vargas’s eyes, is that he is in fact asking for something.

  “Trota deserves that and more,” he adds.

  Emotional blackmail, comes to Vargas’s mind. Having established a sweat pact instead of a blood pact now, he holds his boss’s towel with both hands and returns it to him, bending his neck a little, which Rodrigo Mesa reads as a nod. Something is burning in Pedro Vargas’s chest: hanging from his neck is a medallion of the Virgin of Vera Cruz; he forgot to take it off before the match and he knows his skin will itch afterward.

  “We’ll have to change doors and put locks in. We’ll need chairs and tools, Vargas. Insulating tape, meters of rope.”

  “How many?”

  “We can’t run short,” says Rodrigo Mesa.

  Raise your glasses, here’s a toast to exact and precise measurements! thinks Vargas, although he then replies all docile and helpful:

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Shortly after, Virginia arrives with their little girls and kisses Rodrigo Mesa. “Are we interrupting anything?” Rodrigo Mesa says no, and caresses Sofía and Teresa: his two beloved daughters, what he loves most in this world. Vargas’s wife will arrive later, with their only son, who, as well as being a bit older than Sofía and Teresa and being named after his father, seems to be destined to become, in time and to all appearances, his clone. Fortunately the boss’s wife is a good cook, so they eat wonderfully; after their tennis matches they usually have a picnic right there; and the children play hide-and-seek, war games, cowboys and Indians, in the abandoned palazzo.

  Innocent children’s games, play cook, play shop.

  “What would the gentleman like?” ¿Qué quiere el señor?

  “Milk.” Leche.

  “What kind of milk?” ¿Qué tipo de leche?

  “Butterfly milk.” Leche de mariposa.

  “I don’t have any, sir.” No tengo, señor.

  “I do! I have butterfly milk.” Pues yo si tengo leche de mariposa.

  And more games then: hide-and-seek, war games, cowboys and Indians, ghost hunting.

  After running around, making noise, laughing, crying, and more running around, Rodrigo Mesa’s daughters will use the white towel that was draped over the net; they’ll tie it to the end of a stick to make a white flag and signal their surrender.

&nbs
p; The day will surrender a bit later too. Orange rays of sun on the court’s clay soil. Vargas will collect everything then, and make a mental note: they need to whitewash the lines of the court before the next match.

  “Do you think it’ll work?”

  The palazzo is a bit abandoned, but it might work. It’s spacious. Quite remote. There aren’t many houses nearby, it’s got protection and a perimeter fence. The streetlights, thanks to the town hall, are not very abundant, and that will make things easy. The few people who live there, in small, scattered apartment blocks, are mostly young families who can’t afford to live in the city center. These are neat three- or four- floor apartment blocks, well built, good urban developments spaciously arranged; it’s hard to imagine the building boom that will take place later, in the nineties. Surrounded by an old-fashioned garden and a tennis court riddled with puddles, the palazzo has lots of rooms, six or seven at least, he estimates at first glance. There may be more. And there must be a basement too, surely. There are cockroaches on the staircases, pigeons made neckless by the morning chill coo on the roof’s eaves, paint peels off the walls, and everywhere but everywhere, chips of broken enamel. And dust, and spiderwebs.

  “What’s in the garage?”

  “Not much now. The boys leave their motorbikes there sometimes.”

  Standing in front of the door, he pushes aside the heavy canvas that doubles as a curtain: cracked spark plugs in a wooden box. A green hose, punctured in all likelihood, the smell of oil and gas, a kayak tied to a red plastic buoy, a 1982 calendar from last year’s World Cup. A Sanglas sidecar, an old Lambretta, an upside-down gas can, a Vaseline tube squeezed to extinction by buzzard claws.

  “They bring dogs sometimes too.”

  “Dogs?”

  “Yes, to train them.”

  “Well, they can’t bring them anymore. No more dogs, no more motorbikes, no more tennis matches for a while. Is that clear?”

 

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