Even faith is eroded by time.
In contrast with the two young kidnappers, who stare at the ground, the group leader looks into his eyes and lowers his chin, with a reverence that Rodrigo Mesa interprets as scorn. Reverence and contempt, both together. The sophistication of the gesture takes him by surprise and, although he tries to imitate him, he knows he’s failed, that he only managed half the gesture, the reverential part, tainted with a trace of defeatist resignation perhaps. He feels that the accused has won this hand, and immediately after wonders which one of the two has aged more since the last time they saw each other. He’d rather draw no conclusions.
But these are nothing but fast sparks; everything is a momentary matter, that surge of unexpected admiration, the successive reverence and disdain. Soon, the kidnapped man’s figure captures all his attention: his long beard, the too-large clothes that reveal the many kilos he lost while in captivity, the difficulty with which he opens his eyes, his extreme weakness, his inability to remain standing. Shivering under some blankets, the man seems sick, dying almost, as if he’s just been rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building. And they’ll say we are the torturers, thinks Lieutenant Colonel Rodrigo Mesa, and he returns to his role and his uniform, certain that the man will never recover from such a traumatic experience.
Rodrigo Mesa enters the damp zulo. Leftover food in the pans, gas canisters, milk in stainless steel canteen cups, a bag of rice, empty water bottles, old newspapers, a camera, blankets and a musty smell, a big, wide-bottomed pot filled with sand, which the kidnapped man must have used to do his business.
The judge and his assistants approach, to take notes and supervise the work of the crime scene investigators. The magistrate congratulates him and the lieutenant colonel perceives his usual, too-strong perfume. The gesture of reverence and scorn he received from the kidnapper before, now, at last, he’s been able to return to the judge. It happens sometimes: we enact the correct gesture with the wrong person. Or maybe not: a gesture learned from the wrong person serves us to enact the appropriate gesture for the right person. Suddenly the patrol agents bring him a message: Virginia is calling. He’s about to become a grandfather and both his wife and daughter are at the hospital.
They’re having difficulties getting the baby out. They already knew his daughter had a small womb, but the baby’s reluctance to get out must be strong; apparently the creature is not very inclined to leave the refuge. They have to provoke the birth. His adored daughter, Teresa, the youngest of the two, split in half; the thought of it gives him shudders and makes him proud at the same time. The process of her giving birth is more agonizing than what he’d gone through that morning. He would like to start imparting orders, but he can’t do that here, despite still being in uniform; the colorful fishhooks on his chest are worth nothing. He has to share the wait with Virginia and with Teresa’s dumb husband. Judging from the son-in-law’s face, you’d think he’d been beaten up, No one ever taught this one to behave like a man, Rodrigo Mesa thinks. After two long hours, his daughter finally gives birth; an orange split in two, one of its halves with a vocation for endurance; the other, Teresa, you could say with a vocation for giving up. She really looks like someone who’s just given birth, the baby sucked up a lot of her energy, she seems thin, more so when she tries to work out a smile, she’s down to her very bones, with thin, disheveled hair; Rodrigo Mesa takes his fourth grandchild in his arms, a tiny baby that could be held with one hand, too blind still to be able to perceive the glint of the medals on his chest. After a lot of days, weeks, months, years, sometimes it happens that events concentrate in a single day, obstacles disappear, open-ended issues resolve; the world moves forward, unstoppable, complex, manifesting the obvious insignificance of our will and upending any plans we might ever make.
“It’s a boy, Rodri,” his wife says; and grandfather and grandson are, for a moment, two babies, each younger than the other.
How long has it been since his wife’s called him Rodri?
“A boy, Rodri, like you wanted.”
Even though it’s a boy, he looks more like Teresa and not so much like the son-in-law. He must remain alert, in any case: you never know with people, they could stab you in the back and their faces change when you least expect it. He must remain watchful, in case he ends up looking too much like his dumb father.
They take the baby from his arms when he starts to cry; “it’s because of the uniform,” he apologizes, the fabric is so rough – Virginia told him about starch once. Then he remembers how that man cried when they freed him from his confinement, and is surprised to realize how little the kidnapped man’s tears moved him, and how much his newborn grandchild’s did.
Fontecha got home exhausted. Ever since he’d joined the domestic violence commission his sojourns to Gasteiz stretched for too long. Patricia was working on her laptop on the living room table, with a long-stemmed glass full of wine and three slices of just-toasted bread, each with a different cheese on.
“Work dinner, love?” Fontecha asked, with irony.
“Needs muse…”
He kissed her on the cheek and brought another wine glass from the kitchen.
“We’ve quite a complicated surgical procedure tomorrow. I was going through it.”
“Let me guess: a valve replacement?”
“Yes, a complex one: we’re going to stop the heart and lungs with the new machine. We’ll be able to work more comfortably like that. Do you want to see the diagram?”
“Not with dinner, I’d rather not, thanks.”
Patricia was passionate about her work. Like in all other aspects of her life, she was methodical, demanding, mindful of every detail in that area too. She liked things to go well and got very angry if they didn’t go according to plan. She’d been experiencing a very happy interlude ever since they’d brought that new machine to the clinic, a professional joy that Fontecha didn’t quite understand but found quite amusing all the same. He was always enthralled listening to her talk about how they used valves taken from pig hearts or about impossible alloys, although it was hard for him sometimes to follow her explanations. “We’re going to stop the heart and lungs with the new machine to be able to work more comfortably.” Were there really machines for that? Apparently, there were. Afterward a spark and everything just restarts. Fontecha wanted that to be possible in his work too: to stop for a moment his heart and lungs, not to have someone work on his entrails in the meantime, of course, but to be able to somehow take a rest. Afterward, a spark and he could continue working, with renewed strength, certain that his heart and lungs wouldn’t fail him. It wouldn’t be too bad either, let’s not deny it, to be able to stop someone else’s heart. He quickly drew up a long list of lowlifes whose valves he’d like to replace, lowlifes whose hearts he’d like to hold in his hands. Unlike his wife, Fontecha would get out of the operating theater leaving the patient’s chest wide open.
“Not bad, this wine.”
“Lately, and alluding to its beneficial effects on cardiovascular health, all my patients gift me bottles of wine,” says Patricia with a smile.
Fontecha grabbed the bottle and put his reading glasses on to read the label: Château Latour, 1994. Grape modalities: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc.
“How much would you say this bottle is worth?”
“A mileurista’s monthly wage. It’s a Pauillac, from near Saint-Julien…Remember Antoinette and Philippe? They live not far from there.”
Her mention of Antoinette and Philippe soured his drink. On one occasion they’d given him a young, low-quality wine to taste and, not knowing any better, he praised it. The three of them, Antoinette, Philippe, and Patricia, laughed at him. “The true wines are about to be served, reserve your praises for later,” Philippe told him patronizingly, hoping to underline perhaps that putting up with jokes like that one was the price he had to pay to be accepted among his class. “You’re not one of us, but we accept you…just know that the toll you�
�ll have to pay for that is our petty-bourgeois disdain and giggles at the enormity of your unknowing. We’ll teach you, but only slowly. We’ll teach you, but we’ll have fun in the process. Nothing comes free.”
Nothing comes free.
The wages that supported the real expenditure in that household were Patricia’s. The wine expert’s vantage point was Patricia’s. They were Patricia’s too, although they were now “friends of the two of us,” those yacht-owning summer friends who invited them to spend the Easter holidays in ostentatious castles in the Loire Valley. He was only a modest politician. A politician from the land of the barbarians, that’s how they made him feel on the few occasions they visited Philippe and Antoinette. He felt so humiliated before them when his party, not knowing what to do with him, sent him to the European Parliament, and he had to confess to Philippe and Antoinette that, no, he didn’t speak French or English. The French were true politicians, real statesman, French politics were top-notch politics, unlike what Fontecha and his party members were doing in Spain…On one occasion, Philippe gave him an article by Oriana Fallaci about Andreotti, as if that Frenchie boy could ever give him a lesson on politics – give him a lesson – when he’d suffered for years under the shadow cast by bodyguards, when he, the ex-government delegate, had breakfasted with news of a new assassination practically every morning in the tumultuous eighties. He still remembered Fallaci’s article, the conclusion she’d drawn after meeting the head of the Italian state: “True power chokes you with silk ribbons, with charm and intelligence.” Yes, that was the kind of sentence Patricia and her Frenchie friends liked. Philippe, Antoinette. A little wine and a cheese platter. But all of that was no impediment for Fontecha. Patricia was the love of his life, and he was willing to forgive everything, including the disdain and the giggles, even the pettiness, because he was completely convinced that she didn’t mean to do it.
“You must’ve talked about the news in the papers, no? They’ve been ringing nonstop, up until ten p.m. I didn’t pick up, of course. In the end, I decided to disconnect the phone. It’s so funny…”
Fontecha knew full well what his wife was talking about. She found it funny? He refilled his glass of wine far beyond what was recommendable, and forgetting the restraint of Antoinette and Philippe, knocked back the cardiovascular health benefits of the Château Latour in one behind Patricia’s back, knowing that she wouldn’t take her eyes off the screen: valves, pigs, inert lungs and a paralyzed heart.
Seeing that Fontecha wasn’t saying anything, Patricia retook the conversation. She still seemed amused:
“You’ll have to clarify to the journalists that I am not exactly a cardiologist, but a cardiovascular surgeon…if this is how rigorous they are with all their news…”
Fontecha felt too tired, and a little disappointed. There was no cure for his tiredness, but he hadn’t been carrying disappointment before crossing his front door, and this hurt him more. Even though he knew he would regret it as soon as he said it, he couldn’t help it:
“Is it really so funny?”
Fontecha tried hard to smile while he formulated the question, but he knew he failed in the attempt, because of his wounded pride. Patricia took her eyes off the screen for the first time.
“You can’t seriously be considering it, Javier…”
“Of course, it wasn’t my intention, but…”
“Have you forgotten what we agreed?”
“No, but things have changed…”
“They’ll destroy you, Javier. The candidate was chosen a long time ago, you know that well…”
“The party asked me to…I’ve received very important phone calls, from people you can’t even imagine.”
“That little Judas Fuchs who called you so that you’d ask to convene an extraordinary congress? You all came out for him like little lambs…He will be the candidate…Do you seriously doubt that?”
Patricia was right. Patricia was right about everything she said. And everything she was reproaching him for now, they’d talked about multiple times after dinner, with disdain, laughing, underscoring how far they were from those miserly party intrigues, shielding themselves – through laughter – from those repugnant beings who’d stab each other in the back for a speck of power, casting protective spells that’d stop them from ever being tempted to engage in those fratricidal battles that brought out the worst inhumanity. Patricia was right, but that didn’t make Fontecha feel calmer, not at all.
“Nothing’s been decided yet.”
Patricia stood up from her chair.
“You are thinking about it! Have you been brainwashed, or what? How long have you known? Why didn’t you mention it to me before?”
“As I said, nothing’s been decided yet.”
“But you’re thinking about it…”
“Yes, I’m thinking about it. What’s so bad about thinking about it?”
“Everything, if you know from the beginning that what you’re thinking leads nowhere.”
“It might be an opportunity. The last one.”
“They’ve given you a pick and a shovel so that you can dig your own grave…Fuchs will be the candidate, you know that better than anyone.”
Perhaps because she understood that she’d been too harsh, Patricia got close to him to whisper in a low voice, certain that physical contact would soften the cruel truth of her words. She brought her hand toward him, not to caress his neck lovingly, not to pat his shoulder patronizingly. She placed her hand somewhere in the middle. Lovingly. Patronizingly. Certain that the love he felt for her would tilt the balance toward perceiving the gesture as loving.
“Darling, don’t you realize?”
“I’ve always supported you. I’ve always encouraged you in your career.”
“I know, darling.”
“And you, why don’t you?”
“Let me be clear: the decision is yours. I will be by your side, you know that. But I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d be throwing yourself to the wolves, and, I’m sorry, but you are not one of them. I wouldn’t be with you if you were.”
“But I used to be…”
“You, a wolf?”
“What do you think this was like in the eighties? I was a government delegate…We hadn’t met yet…”
“Things have changed a lot since then. The world was dirtier, but politics was cleaner.”
A blast of naïveté, at last. “If only you knew, Patricia,” he thought, and for a moment his wife’s naïveté made him feel stronger than her. “You, with your amazing ability to stop hearts and lungs; you, with your well-supplied bank account, your love of theater. You, with your ability to speak in-depth, at length, about the plot in La Traviata, with your collection of Cecilia Bartoli albums, your Château Lafite, your Château Latour, your “it’s a Pauillac,” with your perfect French, you, my dear wife, not even you know everything. You know almost nothing about my world. About my previous life. If you knew you know nothing, would you live with me at all? Would you’ve ever opened the door to my petty-bourgeois humiliation? We’re going to stop the heart and lungs to be able to work more comfortably…what would you say if I told you that I too know a thing or two about that?”
He thinks it, but he doesn’t say it.
The world was dirtier then, but politics was cleaner.
Wasn’t it the other way around? We were all younger, Fontecha tells himself, that was the only difference. The smell of putrefaction was different among the young and the old. Even though they were all corrupt, young and old putrefaction attracted different kinds of flies.
“What’s on your mind, Javier?”
“Maybe you’re right: I shouldn’t put myself forward. I’m too old for this.”
“You’re too good to go on the first row. That’s all I’m trying to tell you.”
It was Pedro Vargas’s idea to hand over the weapons in the reservoir. They bring the missing documentation too, as well as the car a
nd its key. By the time they collect them from the bar Beti-Jai and bring them over, he and Hernández are waiting with the materials.
“Only one key?”
The man with a second eyebrow above the first says he wants a duplicate key.
“What for?”
“What happens if we lose it?”
Pedro Vargas doesn’t even respond. It’s not worth it. He hands over the documentation and the photographs, and introduces them to Hernández. The Portuguese don’t object much to the documentation: they only pay attention to the photographs, like people who skim through the society and politics pages of newspapers until they reach the sports section, blatantly ignoring the reports with too much writing on them. Vargas opens the trunk of the car and shows them the weapons. The Portuguese stare at them like children contemplating a candy store. Initially, they are dazzled by the semiautomatics.
“Benelli?”
“Yes, Benelli.”
They remove the safety locks and inspect the ammunition: everything is in order.
“And the Beretta guns?”
Pedro Vargas opens the second box.
“There are no Beretta guns: these are Star. Aren’t they good enough for you?”
“We asked for Beretta guns.” It’s not the guy with the double eyebrow who speaks now, but the other. A thorough brute.
“There are no Berettas, I’m sorry.”
“We won’t do it without the Berettas.”
Pedro Vargas starts to get nervous. He thought the boss had already negotiated all that. He takes one of the Star guns and loads it, furious. So much so, that the thorough Portuguese brute for a moment fears he might intend to kill them right there and then: he regrets the two brandies he had for breakfast; if he hadn’t drunk them, maybe his reflexes would be quick enough to get the little Derringer gun out of his jacket pocket. Pedro Vargas’s change of humor takes everyone by surprise. Not only the Portuguese. Also his colleague Hernández.
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