Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  Fontecha is too young to be a government delegate, and he knows it. That’s why he’s despotic and arrogant. Because of that, and because he understands the post as a favor that they’ll have to pay him for in the future, with even more succulent posts. It’s as if his way of speaking makes him sound older, or twenty centimeters taller, or brings him within sight of the Devil’s eyes. He fails in all three objectives.

  “I’ll tell the boys now, don’t worry: lately, only Vargas and I come over.”

  They’re still in the middle of the court, near the net. The trace of lime on the soil has started to vanish and the net is loose, much lower in the middle than in the extremes. They go through the rooms. It smells musty, as if it’s been raining on the carpet. It happens: sometimes the dampness outside manifests inside, and stains appear, revealing the true colors of the walls. There are some drips here and there, but the house is otherwise in pretty good shape. Not good enough to live in, obviously. The floorboards complain as they walk, the cork cracks. Yes to this, no to that, yes to this, no to that. “This, this, and this.” All three without windows.

  “I want a red mark on the door of each of these three rooms.” In what used to be the kitchen, he turns a tap. Not a drop of water pours from it, unlike the roof.

  “The water is off most of the time, but the plumbing works. If you want, we can turn the water on.”

  “Today if that’s at all possible, Rodrigo.”

  “Leave it to me, I’ll talk to Vargas.”

  “This Vargas guy…can we trust him?”

  More than any loyal Christian, Don Pedro, my lord, thinks Rodrigo Mesa. But he says something else:

  “Completely, sir.”

  “We must choose our men well, Rodrigo, this is a delicate matter.”

  “I understand, Fontecha. Here, I’ve made copies of the keys for you.”

  Rodrigo Mesa takes Sofía and Teresa to the reservoir, to go fishing.

  “There used to be a village down there, once.”

  “Really?”

  “And where are its inhabitants now?”

  “They left their houses and went to live in other houses.”

  “And what did they do with their things?”

  “They took them too.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “And their dogs?”

  “They took them too.”

  “And their cats?”

  “Them too.”

  The two children remain pensive, staring into the water as if they can sense something in it. It looks like they can’t think of anything other than the things one might take from a village that’s about to be flooded.

  “You can’t see anything.”

  “It all happened a long time ago.”

  He bought new fishing lures, black-and-yellow ones, striped like bees. The girls have similar pajamas. Rodrigo Mesa’s fishhook collection is impressive. His daughters like to spend hours looking at them; his father keeps them in perfect order, the way a painter keeps colors on a palette. He dusts them with a brush. He sometimes makes artificial flies himself, adding thread and feathers to the ones he buys in shops. “They look like earrings,” Teresa remarked once. And she wasn’t completely wrong: on one occasion he’d improvised a hook with an earring his wife no longer used. Fish like anything that shines.

  “Careful, don’t hurt yourselves, they’re very sharp.”

  “Aren’t you going to use a worm, dad?”

  “No, we can fish without a worm too.”

  His daughters don’t seem convinced. “And the fish will bite even if there’s no bait on the hook? Impossible.” They’ve seen too many cartoons, they find it hard to believe that you can fool a real fish with a plastic one, or with bits of colored metal that are not even shaped like fishes. They laugh, laugh in amazement. “Wow!” As their father shakes the fishing rod and they see how far the fishing line goes.

  “Where is it? I can’t see the line…”

  “Some things can’t be seen.”

  But now Sofía and Teresa have other things in mind. They leap and dance, holding each other by the hand.

  “Can we put the radio on, dad?”

  His daughters have absolutely no faith in their father’s fishing. Rodrigo Mesa is not very good at saying no to his daughters either. They open the doors of the R18 and turn the radio on, searching for music.

  “Hey! It took the bait!”

  Sofía and Teresa seldom see their father look so happy. Which is reason enough to stop what they’re doing. They help him reel in the line, although in truth, and because of its weight, he immediately realizes that the trout they caught is small, too small. He removes the hook from the poor fish, which flips and struggles for air while the girls shriek with excitement and fright. It’s good for them to see fish outside the frying pan, that’s what Rodrigo Mesa thinks, although his wife gets a bit upset if he guts them in front of the children. It’s bigger than he thought, but he doesn’t think it meets that required minimal measurement. He places the trout next to the pencil he uses to measure his catch.

  “Almost, but not quite,” he says.

  He returns it to the water.

  “Why did you let it go?”

  “It’s forbidden to catch such small fish. We have to let them grow. Otherwise, you get a fine.”

  “A fine? You can get them too?”

  Rodrigo Mesa smiles. Who guards the guard? The question bounces around the corners of his mind.

  “I can get them too, my love.”

  When they arrive home, Virginia tells him that Javier Fontecha called. He returns the call to confirm that it’s true, that the Portugal thing is a go-ahead. That everything is going as planned. Exactly as planned. Shortly after, he receives the phone call he was waiting for. This time he picks up the phone. He always picks up when he’s at home. They tell him the appointment time, in bad Spanish.

  “No way: not in Portugal. Galicia is better.”

  He hears them argue at the other end of the line.

  “All right, take note.”

  He writes their address down with a pencil, in the corner of an old day planner. “A fragment of Kosmos, the Russian satellite, could impact the earth today,” the newspaper said, for a week. It doesn’t look like it hit us, it occurs to him. The tip of the pencil breaks when he writes exerting too much pressure, so he asks one of his daughters to sharpen it again. She is delighted with the command and does it docilely. After five minutes she returns it to her father, sharp, but visibly shorter.

  He’ll have to remember to pick up a new one, because that was the pencil he used to measure the trout.

  The meeting takes place in Redondela, in a field near the village, in the daytime. Rodrigo Mesa preferred not to meet in Portugal: given what they were going to pay them, the least they could do was cross the Minho to negotiate conditions. A Salazarista friend of Rodrigo Mesa’s father put them in touch. He assures him that they can be trusted. People of scant words. Better that way.

  He quickly rejects one of them: his skin is too dark. He is probably more effective in his work – he could easily imagine him in the Angolan War or in Cabo Verde, giving orders at the shooting range with a rifle slung over his shoulder, basically just another extremity – but his presence would be too noticeable. No. He’ll have to make do with the other two. Not the black one. How could he say what he needed to say without appearing racist? Impossible. The other two don’t look like the most discreet people in the world either and, even less so, in possession of the kind of self-control required to keep away from hard liquor for two weeks in a row. But things are what they are. Hopefully they’d do what they had to do well, and they wouldn’t be too clear about what they were doing or who they were doing it for: that’s what’s important; although after a time of course the truth will come out and everyone will know. Submerged worlds tend to come to the surface, sooner or later. Although they try to behave with a certain deference, Rodrigo Mesa notices that they can hard
ly disguise their indifference. But they can’t start looking for someone else now. Besides, what the hell, it’s not like they had to perform open-heart surgery. It’s not so complicated. Their task is of a different kind. Let’s hope they do it well.

  And the money is in the suitcase, they wanted it in French francs, God knows why. Their weapons will come from Italy; they’ll tell them where to pick them up later on.

  They want Beretta guns and Benelli semiautomatics. They are very demanding, these Portuguese guys.

  “We’ll have to see.”

  Since they don’t know the language or the terrain, they’ll need help, of course. Rodrigo Mesa will use some of his men as guides and as shields; he’s weighing some ideas, although he hasn’t made up his mind about anyone but Vargas. “Only a selected few, the finest, like in a drugstore. Como en botica.” Pérez Gomera? Hernández? He’s not so sure about this last one: he seems trustworthy, but too young. They’ll join the Portuguese in the Beti-Jai Grill. But they have to know they can only give them coverage. If they get into trouble, then bye, they’re on their own. The Spanish police cannot be mixed up in that.

  “How will we know who they are?”

  “They’ll know who you are.”

  Rodrigo Mesa feels like the main character in a bad movie. He likes it. While thinking about movies he notices that the whiter of the two guys has quite a visible scar above his eyebrow. It’s shaped like a second eyebrow, one without a single hair. Quite an evident physical marking, the kind you notice on first sight, something that sticks in your mind. But, after the look he got from the black guy, “You’d be too noticeable over there,” he doesn’t dare reject another one. He already knows they see him as “a fussy Spaniard.” But they are the real fusspots: Beretta guns and Benelli semiautomatics – picky, are we? He’ll have to tell his men to wear wigs and glasses. It’d be wise not to trust the professionalism of the Portuguese too much.

  They don’t trust Rodrigo Mesa either, it seems: they take their time to make sure they are not one cent short on the agreed price. They’re not used to counting bills: they had to start over three times before they approved the wad. They are careless even in that.

  Rodrigo Mesa walks away. He walks as if he were carrying something, although he should’ve felt relieved without the suitcase. He sits on the terrace of a bar to drink port under a silver sun. He watches the Portuguese climb into a beat-up Citroën Visa from there. He notes down the plate number, just in case. He orders a second glass of port, he deserves it.

  “More than others, that’s for sure,” he tells himself, bitterly.

  He takes a little sip, just enough to wet his lips.

  “This one’s for you, Trota.”

  You always have to toast someone. He couldn’t think of anyone else. Even though he’s never even seen Alfredo Trota.

  The sun hides for a moment, one of those passing clouds. Obeying the superstition that states that it’s bad luck to drink in the shade, Lieutenant Colonel Rodrigo Mesa waits until the sun comes out again to continue drinking.

  The candidate arrives late because he’s the candidate, and because we always expect a true candidate, like the brides dressed in white from way back, to make us wait. He’s not just any candidate: he’s the candidate to the presidency. Which is not just anything, because this turns him into a potential equation, a walking equation that computes the expectations of favors he might do for people in the future. That walking equation wearing shiny shoes might be a catalyst for the most magnanimous gestures, the most solemn words, once he reaches power – if he does reach power, which he just might. The candidate is a potential equation, true, but not a closed equation, he might be influenced by several factors: he hasn’t fossilized yet, he’s still somewhat flexible – only because he hasn’t yet won – and people want to make use of the candidate’s malleability to influence him, to make a good impression. He’s very busy, so it’s not a good idea to hog his attention or to be selfish and try to take advantage of brief lapses of his time to ask him for things; now is not the time for that, but it might be the time to put into practice the art of lightly planting the seedlings of those hypothetical future favors, through smiles, little taps on the back, emphatic nods, and other signs of unbreakable loyalty. “I’m with you, Presidente, for whatever you need, until the end, no matter what.”

  The candidate’s charm resides in his ephemeral nature too: he’s slippery, we know he doesn’t have the time to attend to us, so he can’t disappoint us. And we confuse that transitory impossibility of disappointment with infallibility – our greatest mistake.

  The candidate arrives late, but he arrives, which is what matters. The candidate is here now, and as is to be expected he doesn’t come alone, he brings along the people who organize his schedule, those in charge of communications, secretaries, and the other movers and shakers and advisers that make up his cohort; so many that it’s hard sometimes to figure out who is leading. The candidate stretches his hand out to the party members that ask for it, although he doesn’t know the names of most of them. He feels like a zookeeper feeding the flamingos. The candidate, putting his reflexes to the test, tries to grab and extract any virtue or extravagance that stands out from the whole from every place he finds himself in – he should be good at that. Thus, if he notices someone who is too young for politics, he grips their hand particularly hard, and tells them: “This is so good, I love it, the party needs young, committed people.” He sees his followers as beggars, and himself as the one giving alms. Yes, he’s conscious of it: he goes around giving blessings and ameliorating despair, so to speak. It’s what people call the erotics of power.

  After greeting a lot of people he doesn’t know, he comes across someone familiar at last; he gives this one a powerful hug, as well as the de rigueur handshake and an exchange of pleasantries. Those who surround him will be able to interpret that, on a small scale, this is the candidate’s candidate, the man that should be obeyed in the region. Every now and then they introduce him to someone new, to some local promise or some new member, an important professional or someone of renown in their sector. This kind of person, along with the handshake, gets a few words. Something like:

  “I’ve heard great things about you.”

  On ninety percent of occasions, of course, the candidate hasn’t heard anything, not good nor bad, about the person in question, but that’s the least of it. The candidate knows that his handshake makes people trust him and that, beyond, makes them feel that he is with them, this is important; more so, considering that the person he’s just been introduced to might be tomorrow’s adversary or annihilator.

  That, more or less, is what Fontecha remembered the day they introduced him to his party’s candidate, who later on became president-elect. Fontecha had the dubious privilege of being one of those people the candidate addressed a few words to. The candidate knew nothing about him but despite that, and because he had to, because this life is nothing more than a succession of instants in which we’re obliged to say what we must, he told him:

  “I’ve heard great things about you.”

  Shortly thereafter, he was made a government delegate. But that happened many years ago, in another lifetime, and his political career never took off the way everyone expected. Fontecha’s dream now was to become the man who says: “I’ve heard great things about you.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Rodrigo Mesa is usually in a hurry to remove his stripes. The uniform has always felt too stiff to him; Virginia once told him about starch, she irons it for him; it’s not comfortable and he knows that that second skin is the first thing people notice about him – if not the only thing. That’s what the uniform was invented for. To be seen from a distance, long before the person wearing it. Those colorful buttons on the chest, those little toys that some call medals and look so much like fishhooks. The higher he goes, the less he’s obliged to wear the uniform, and that’s his main motivation to keep going up in the ranks. He often thinks that he owes many of the habits of his
profession to the uniform, and he has the feeling that when he takes it off he gets rid of those bad habits too: every evening when he gets home, he hopes to return to that happy and optimistic Rodrigo Mesa of his youth, and he’s hoping he will, once he retires and is able to definitively remove that attire.

  Stepping out of the uniform and getting a shave, those are the two main happinesses he allows his corrupt body: he thinks he recovers his nakedness and innocence when he removes that second skin. Getting a shave and the rub of the aftershave lotion on clean skin bring the ephemeral memory of the softness of his pink childish face, and with it a feeling of transitory rejuvenation.

  Today’s operation is special, however, and he has to enter the patrol with the stripes on, before he has a chance to shave. The judge who’s just arrived from Madrid’s High Court to direct the operation – “Direct? Ha! They wish!” – travels in the car next to his. It’s the same one who once tried to link them to the GAL, funnily enough. It was a clean operation. Everything went well. The kidnappers offered no resistance, and one of them, the eldest, was recognized by Rodrigo Mesa.

  That man has been sent to jail before. He spent at least six years behind bars, and he’ll get twice as many this time. He got out of jail and immediately returned to life underground. As if he didn’t know how to do anything else. In a remote corner of his mind where hatred and contempt have taken permanent hold, a spark of admiration for the accused suddenly flares up. His bosses can say what they want, but they cannot deny there was political motivation there: these aren’t common criminals. Nothing like the playful contract killers who demand Beretta guns and Benelli semiautomatics. No, these are men of a different kind. And precisely because they are, the law applies to them differently. ZEN. Zona Especial Norte. Special Northern Zone. The plan initiated by that minister who looks like an owl was called that for a time. It’s useless to deny it. That man, after some years getting a stripy tan, returned to the service of terrorists to take part in a kidnapping, be detained, and, loyally, hand over another ten years of his life to the cause. He had to accept that there were enemies and enemies, and Rodrigo Mesa acknowledged that this sewer rat had a well-developed sense of loyalty, that he was consequent with his ideals. He had no doubts about Vargas, but…who among the men under his command would preserve such loyalty and coherence after so many years? And, looking at it from another perspective: would he be loyal enough to have Fontecha’s back and omit his name when, as it seemed, he was made to face a tribunal again?